One thing the world agrees on after Michael Jackson’s death yesterday at age 50 is that the brilliant, bizarre, controversial and tragic little boy who never grew up was one of the greatest and most unique talents who ever lived.
The former front boy for the Motown phenomenon The Jackson Five was pronounced dead at 2:26 p.m. Wednesday at UCLA Medical Center near his rented Holmby Hills mansion in L.A., according to the Los Angeles Times.
Paramedics who responded to a 911 call about two hours earlier found Jackson unconscious and being given CPR by his personal physician. After working on him for 42 minutes, they took him to the medical center where doctors continued in vain to resuscitate him. The apparent cause was cardiac arrest; an autopsy is planned for today.
Michael Jackson
In Detroit, outside the now-shabby Motown Historical Museum and onetime recording headquarters of Motown Records where Jackson got his start, fans gathered as they did around the world to contribute mementos to makeshift shrines, play his music and commiserate. The Detroit Free Press quoted one as saying the pop star “will be missed like Princess Diana.”
The Associated Press reported that as word of his demise spread around the world, so many Google users tried to confirm the news that the search engine interpreted it as an automated computer attack.
The self-proclaimed King of Pop sold more than a half-billion music albums in his nearly lifelong career, including 1982’s “Thriller,” the top-selling record of all time with 50 million copies worldwide.
After the peak of his popularity in the 1980s, Jackson’s personal life and appearance became increasingly bizarre. His originally handsome features were whittled away by “cosmetic” surgery that ultimately left him with a ghastly white, skeletal face and a scarlet-ringed rictus for a mouth.
Before the costs of a lavish lifestyle outstripped his ability to pay them, he lived as a recluse at Neverland Ranch, the California estate he named for the haven of Peter Pan, the fictional sprite who never grew up. It was there, with his own amusement park and other child-oriented fixtures, that he entertained children and eventually faced charges as a pedophile. He settled a 1993 case for $23 million and was acquitted of separate charges in 2005.
He then moved for a time to Dubai to escape publicity that a family friend said had “demolished his spirit and soul.”
Jackson’s former manager, Tommy Mottola, told the Los Angeles Times that “Michael lived a tortured life. With his successes came all the pressures. Imagine living with that stress on a minute-to-minute, day-by-day basis. And that’s going on in life from the age of 5 or 6 to 50. It’s almost shocking he made it through this long.”
Frail and using a wheelchair just a year ago, Jackson had returned to Los Angeles to prepare for a 50-concert comeback schedule that was to begin next month in London and help pay off his enormous personal debts.
Don Barden, a Detroit businessman who escorted Jackson around the city in 1998 to promote plans for a $1 billion resort that never came to be, described the late singer, dancer, songwriter, producer and onetime cultural icon as “a perfectionist … a brilliant genius in his field. And once you got to know him,” Barden told the Free Press, “he was a down-to-earth guy who missed his childhood.”
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1 Comments
#1. Mary Lacey 06.26.2009
My heart goes out to the Jackson family i fell their pain.I never met Micheal in person it fell like loose one of my family members.
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