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Michael Jackson and the Dark Side -- what drove him over? Michael Jackson was surrounded by invisible sharks, “some of the smartest people who could plot with the tenacity and brilliance of a Darth Vader.”
Last night on nationally broadcast “Coast to Coast AM” pop culture/mass behavior pontificator Howard Bloom, my husband, tried to convince his host, Ian Punnett, that Michael Jackson was the greatest man who ever lived. Or, at least that he’d ever known, and he’d worked with an incredible number of people, from Buzz Aldrin to Prince.
“If you stacked all those people end to end, you wouldn’t have gotten one Michael Jackson,” Howard declared. “Michael Jackson was the most profoundly astonishing person I ever met…capable of seeing infinity in a fly…in a fingertip.” more
I’d check Buzz Aldrin on that ballot and I don’t think Howard convinced Punnett, either.
First, there’s the pedophilia stuff. Howard would have us believe Michael just loved children and child-like play because, performing from age 3, he was deprived of a childhood; that he didn’t molest kids, he just wanted to make them happy like he never was.
Okay, Punnett says. He wants to make up for the childhood he didn’t have. But at some point celebrity is “often used as justification for satisfying some basic urges.”
And Punnett can’t buy that a grown man wouldn’t know that it was wrong to have children play in your bed – even after he’d paid out millions of dollars to adolescent accusers. “Why would you go on inviting children into your bedroom? Walking hand in hand down the street with a 9-year-old?” Punnett asked. Especially going on TV and asking an interviewer: ‘What’s wrong with sleeping with children? Sharing my bed?’”
Howard would have us believe that all things appear different before creative genius, that to Michael, “bedroom” simply meant a public place. Sleepovers like an amusement park…
Punnett remained skeptical: “Too bad you couldn’t have sent him an email and said ‘ixnay on the edroom bay.”
Howard went further, likening Jackson to Albert Einstein, known to leave for work in his pajamas.
“He (Einstein) was trying to understand the deepest thing in the universe…the geometry of the universe.” There were apparently no neurons left for the concept of wearing pants and shirt to work. Likewise, Michael Jackson didn’t have any to spare for making wise choices in human interactions and in hiring people.
Which brings us back to the sharks.
Michael’s great fortune looked like plump juicy pickings to the unscrupulous. Those dark doers around him plotted to get big heaving hunks of it even if they had to harm Michael in doing so, Howard believes. Perhaps they even encouraged his overuse of prescription drugs and who knows what other destructive behaviors.
Howard also met Joe Jackson, Michael’s father, who has been vilified for his childhood abuse of Michael and the other Jackson boys. While he had a negative response to the man, he thinks “evil dad” has always been a red herring in the mystery of Michael.
“Joe is really not the story,” Howard said. “He’s responsible for the discipline that brought that family to the pinnacle of success.”
Nevertheless, the horror stories are pretty vivid. Belts and bashings and stuff.
It was 1983 when the Jackson family contacted Howard, then a music publicist, and asked him to work for Michael, especially for the upcoming Victory Tour. Howard says he turned them down -- several times. Because, as he explained, he was a star-maker. He worked for unknowns and made them stars, like Prince, or people who needed career boosts, like John Mellencamp. He told Joan Jett he would make her a star in three years and did it in half the time. He did it by studying them and reaching in to tap their souls. Michael Jackson didn’t need him. He was already a superstar. He had just made the biggest record seller of all time.
The Jacksons persisted, however, and asked for a meeting when they were in Manhattan, where Howard’s Howard Bloom Organization was based. Howard said he agreed to meet, simply to give them the courtesy of an in-person turn-down.
He told me many times that when he walked into that midnight meeting at the Helmsley Palace hotel, he was instantly blown away by the body language of the other Jackson brothers. He perceived them to be four of the most decent people he ever met, but also that they were up against something evil they didn’t even understand.
And then there was Michael’s omnipresence. How he saw miracles in just a glimpse of a proposed album cover.
Howard believes that, more than anything, he was hired to save the soul of Michael Jackson and saving souls secularly was his business. He couldn’t turn them down.
The Victory Tour, of course, is history, but there were many dicey moments. I talked about one paparazzi attack earlier.
One day, the Boston Herald American’s publisher decreed that the paper would carry one Michael Jackson story every day. Traditional journalists protested that this was not legitimate news – to no avail. When a Jackson story went on the cover of the newspaper it sold 35,000 more copies than usual. Pretty soon the Boston Globe and other papers had to follow suit with saturation coverage. At one point, Howard said, there were 3,100 reporters covering the tour and 1,100 traveling along with it. Unprecedented success, for Michael and his publicist. But there was that dark side.
A story every day? Imagine. With publishers and editors demanding that much Michael Jackson copy, reporters grabbed any rumor and ran with it.
“If someone else published it, you did too,” Howard said. “You’d have to run with it fast. There was no time to check.”
Bizarre newspaper stories would stalk Michael for the next 25 years – to the end of his life and even now, beyond the grave. Dr. Ann Blake-Tracy preceded Howard on Punnett’s show. She insisted that Michael’s death was due to serotonin syndrome caused by his e cocktail of anti-depressant drugs. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter and vasoconstrictor which stimulates smooth muscle tissue and affects regulation of cyclic bodily processes.
When serotonin is too high, all major organs shut down. It cuts off all oxygen to the brain, lungs, etc. Michael was taking all sorts of medication you’re not supposed to mix, including, apparently, Demerol, a pain killer notorious for affecting serotonin levels, she said. It should be taken off the market, she said, and you can’t mix it with anti depressants without risking death. (Blake-Tracy is the author of Prosac: Panacea or Pandora? It discusses the danger of a class of antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Lovan Luvox and more.)
Michael made the same mistake Elvis did in combining so many prescription drugs. He evidently had “enablers.” Serotonin buildup in the intestinal tract creates nightmares and sleepwalking. Which may account for Michael’s premonition of death.
To all those searching for the cause of Michael’s death you just want to say “Duh?”
It is tragic that people with the financial resources to get the best medical advice that money can buy fall victim to this. There is surely culpability enough to go around – of Michael’s physicians, his family, Michael himself.
Howard Bloom, however, would lay the majority of it on the media.
“There is a poison no one is talking about here. The poison of false headlines. If you were under persistent attack every day of your life for 25 years – as Michael was. He died at 50. That’s half of his life.”
Hmmmmm. “If you…” Bloom asks. Well, if I…I don’t know. I might have my staff keep the newspapers from me. I might distract and amuse myself with some of my billions of dollars. I’d be laughing all the way to my private island in the Virgin Islands like sane billionaire Richard Branson. I don’t quite buy Howard’s “blame the press” message. Celebrities know they will be covered to excess and not necessarily with the truth. Many learn to take it quite in stride. Part of the deal. Superstars are under pressure but can, we assume, afford the very best in psychological counseling if necessary. No, something more was amiss here.
Howard admires Michael for having two or three children dying of cancer brought to him before each concert. He says Michael would spend about 45 minutes with the kids (not alone), rather than taking the time to psych up for the performance. Well, show people prepare in different ways. Perhaps for Michael these kids distracted him from the jitters. Perhaps it was kindness. But not a kindness he couldn’t have performed at times other than just before a concert. There’s more to this, too.
Howard says Michael was going to cancel a Jackson’s concert one time when his brother Jackie had a painful bone chip in his leg preventing him from dancing. Howard flew out to California to counsel with Michael, who told him his concern: 10,000 kids wouldn’t get to see Jackie dance and “my brother Jackie is the best dancer…I won’t go out on stage with someone second rate.”
Howard: “I feel I could see Michael open his chest and 10,000 kids were in there…his generosity defied belief.”
Could there be more here? He might have been concerned that a substandard performance would hurt the group’s popularity …
Perhaps Michael was fighting the dark side. But who was Darth Vader? Dad, drugs, deadlines, the nature of celebrity genius itself? We may find out. We may never know.
http://www.examiner.com/article/michael-ja...-drove-him-over
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