MICHAEL JACKSON:

THE PRICE OF SUPERSTARDOM

“… People thought that if I kept living in seclusion the way I was, I might die the way he [Elvis] did. The parallels aren't there as far as I'm concerned… Still, the way Elvis destroyed himself interests me, because I don't ever want to walk those grounds myself."

Michael Jackson, from his autobiography, Moon Walk, 1988

            But apparently the King of Pop changed his mind about The King of Rock, the father-in-law he never met.

            In MySpace, Lisa Marie Presley, recalls how one day in 1993, her husband told her “with an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did."

            Lisa concludes: “The exact Scenario I saw happen on August 16th, 1977, happening again right now with Michael just as he predicted.”

            All of the legendary rock stars in my THE ROCK AND ROLL BOOK OF THE DEAD, The Fatal Journeys of Rock’s Seven Immortals, also predicted an early demise for themselves. “I’m dead already,” said Jimi Hendrix, shortly before his abrupt and mysterious end at age 27. “I wonder if I’ll get as much publicity as him,” said Janis Joplin, who fatally ODed six weeks later, also at 27. “You’re drinking with Number 3,” Jim Morrison toasted his friends shortly afterwards. Cobain wanted to go out “in a flame of glory like Hendrix.” He, too, joined Club 27.

            John Lennon had premonitions of an early, violent end. Jerry Garcia was amazed to reach 53, having clinically died in the hospital nine years before. And Elvis, who had many close scrapes with mortality like the others, had always felt predestined to an early grave.

            His daughter goes on:  "I became very ill and emotionally/spiritually exhausted in my quest to save Michael from certain self-destructive behavior and from the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him.”

            The women of the seven doomed stars said much the same thing, desperately trying to, as Lisa Maria puts it, “save them from the inevitable.”

            Her mother, Priscilla, tried the rescue Elvis, as did his other great love, Linda Thompson. Once Linda asked him what his greatest fault was. Without hesitation, the King replied, “I’m self-destructive. But there’s not a lot I can do about it.” The other stars conceded the same and, in his own way, so did the King of Pop.

            We, the fans, are not only saddened, devastated, by the news of his passing – but we are uncomprehending. Michael Jackson and the others achieved what the rest of us can only dream of – how could they throw it all away? What is this hell inside the heaven of superstardom that consumed them all?

            "I must confess I am not surprised by today's tragic news,” said Jackson’s friend and publicist, Michael Leaven. “Michael has been on an impossibly difficult and often self-destructive journey for years. His talent was unquestionable but so too was his discomfort with the norms of the world. A human is simply cannot withstand this level of prolonged stress."

            Prolonged stress is a euphemism for the crushing pressure of public adulation and demand; living up to an near-divine image; breathing in a fishbowl; relinquishing all privacy; being the never-ending object of gossip and rumor; being surrounded by exploiters and parasites; and, in the end, finding oneself utterly alone and loveless in spite of the adoration of millions.

            All of the martyred stars were distinctly different in personality. But they became much the same in trying to maintain health and sanity in the purgatory called superstardom. Elvis and his son-in-law, Michael, were especially alike.

            “Ambition,” said Elvis, “is a dream with a V-8 engine.”

            All of the stars started with a super V-8. Especially the two Kings. Michael’s ambition was to be even bigger than Elvis. After releasing the world’s biggest album – Thriller (109 million sold) – Jackson set to work trying to break his own record, and Elvis’s too. Meantime, rock’s eternal Peter Pan, built the child’s paradise, Neverland, as the boy Elvis had built Graceland years before. He wore the same fantastical costumes, indulged in every material extravagance, but gave to charity almost more than Elvis himself.

            In 1984, Michael visited the White House and President Reagan decorated him for his huge contributions to drug abuse charities. Thirteen years before, President Nixon rewarded Elvis with a coveted BNDD (Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) badge, enlisting the King to be the adminstration’s “ambassador” in the War on Drugs.

            By this time, though few knew, Elvis was addicted to prescription narcotics. He insisted he need his “medicine” which for many ailments including glaucoma, hypertension, insomnia, and -- according to rumor – lupus, a deadly auto-immune disease brought on and exacerbated by stress.

            His son-in-law was said to have been diagnosed with lupus in 1985. And he, too, began to suffer from an array of other afflictions.

            Michael Jackson’s drug abuse didn’t come to public attention until 1993. He’d recently suffered a series mishaps: He had been badly burned while filming a Pepsi ad, he’d broken a leg, he’d injured his back. Then he was charged with child molestation. To cope, he began consuming great quantities of Oxycontin, Ativan, Xanax, and Valium. When they overwhelmed him, he cancelled his Dangerous tour, and checked into rehab just as Elvis himself had done many times two decades before.

            Then Michael married Elvis’s daughter. “I wanted to save him,” Lisa Marie said. “I felt that I could do it.” But she couldn’t. She filed for divorce two years later. Her mother, Priscilla, hadn’t been able to save Elvis either. She had filed for divorce after six years. Just as Elvis had rapidly deteriorated after his marriage failed, so too did Michael.

            2005 was a horror for the King of Pop. His drug dependency worsened with a second, circus-like trial for child molestation. Though acquitted, he fled in humiliation for Bahrain. His records sales had plummeted, he was rumored to be on the brink of bankruptcy, and he’d had to abandon Neverland. Moreover, he was no longer known as the King of Pop, but as “Jacko the Wacko.”

            Elvis suffered the same purgatory in the last years of his life. His sales too were in the tank and he had to borrow against Graceland to stay afloat. He was called a rock and roll dinosaur and had become a stumbling, obese parody of himself. And, his closest old friends, his bodyguards, were publishing drugstore tell-all, revealing him as a crazed, gun-totting junkie. 

            In the last twenty months of his life, the King was prescribed 12,000 Schedule 1 substances and injectibles: Demerol, dilaudid, Seconal, Tuinol, Placidyl, Valmid, Quaalude, among others. He died just before dragging himself back on the road, hoping the tour would rescue him from professional and financial disaster. The coroner discovered eleven major narcotics in his system. However, his personal physician, prescriber, and enabler, Dr. George Nichopolous, aka “Needle Nick, declared that Elvis had died of “cardiac arrest.”

            In 2007, a Beverly Hills pharmacy sued Michael Jackson alleging that he owed more than $100,000 for prescription drugs. Just before his death, he begrudging consented to a tour, hoping for financial and professional resurrection. His own personal physician and prescriber, Dr Tohme K Tohme, was allegedly injecting the star with Demerol to alleviate the “pain” of rehearsal. The public awaits autopsy results.

            Meantime, the cause of death for the King of Pop is the standard for superstars: cardiac arrest. And again we see the tragic price of pop immortality. But American Idols will continue to crave as if it were salvation itself.