Even compared to legendary eccentrics like Greta Garbo and Liberace, Jackson is still tops.
Bubbles the chimp. The vanishing nose. The baby, cloaked and dangling. OK, maybe Michael Jackson’s cheese has slipped off the cracker.
Now that he’s been formally charged with child molestation, and we’re guaranteed to learn more than we ever wanted to know about the naif of Neverland, let’s consider some other famous pieces of work, past and present.
Is Jackson the weirdest celebrity who ever lived?
Greta Garbo’s biographer, Barry Paris, says the reclusive actress of the 1920s and ’30s used to arrange tiny troll tableaus under her living room couch and was fond of gender-bending pronouncements such as, “I have been smoking since I was a small boy.”
Curmudgeonly W.C. Fields was so worried about losing his money in a bank collapse that he opened small accounts in almost every town he visited, usually in the names of his characters and pen names, such as A. Pismo Clam, Mahatma Kane Jeeves, and Elmer Prettywillie.
Howard Hughes, industrialist, aviator and mogul, spent his last years growing Fu Manchu nails and being obsessed with germs and the movie “Ice Station Zebra.” Convinced he was spied on, he once bought 20 identical Chevrolets. No one, he reasoned, would bug all 20.
And history has seen more than a few mad scientists. Alexander Graham Bell tried to teach his dog to talk. And naturalist Charles Darwin? Unnatural. Locked his wife out of the household drawers and cupboards.
Stephen M. Silverman, news editor of People magazine’s Web site, finds the concept of the eccentric quaint, given the behavior of celebrities these days.
“Eccentric is almost an antiquated term,” he said. “These days we say either “perv or something worse. I just saw “Miracle on 34th Street. Now, (Kris Kringle) is an eccentric. Eccentric is Auntie Mame.”
OK, so is anyone more wacko than Jacko?
“I think we’d be hard-pressed to find someone,” Silverman said. “Look at that mug shot. That’s not even a deer in the headlights because no self-respecting deer would look like that. Even Bambi had better people doing his makeup.”
Jackson once earned headlines for his music. Five No. 1 hits burst from his 1982 classic “Thriller,” which remains the second-best-selling album in history, with 28 million copies moved in the United States alone. It is hard to picture music video in the early ’80s without seeing “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” which forced MTV to open its mind to artists of color. Jackson was the rare recipient of both popular and critical adoration, but has been on a two-decade slide.
Michael Musto, a pop-cult columnist for the Village Voice, makes a clear distinction between celebrity freakiness and criminal conduct. Freakiness, he says, “I celebrate.”
That said, the father of sons Prince Michael I and Prince Michael II is in a class by himself. “He’s encased himself in this bubble which is so removed from reality, and that’s why we have a problem with him,” Musto said. “There’s weird, and there’s Michael Jackson.”
Eccentric, says Musto, is the illustrated man, former basketball rebound machine Dennis Rodman. Or the ex-Mrs. Billy Bob Thornton, Angelina Jolie, “before she found her purpose in life” and went goodwill-hunting for the United Nations.
Jackson, says Musto, goes beyond Elvis (swallowed medicine cabinet, shot TV), Jerry Lee Lewis (married 13-year-old cuz) or Liberace (more on him later).
Jeff Shore, who helped create E! Network’s “True Hollywood Story” and “Celebrities Uncensored,” believes there are more oddballs in music than movies or TV because actors are craftsmen, which requires the ability to work on a firm schedule and film scenes out of order, if necessary.
Musicians? The more off-key the better, Shore says. He supports his argument with the addled Ozzy Osbourne, who bit the head off a live bat tossed on stage at a concert, and the head off a dove at a meeting with his record label. He thought the bat was fake. The dove, he provided himself.
Ludwig van Beethoven, who dipped his noggin in cold water before composing, was so uninterested in cleanliness that his friends used to steal his clothes and launder them while he slept, according to Karl Shaw’s “Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics.”
And the sequined pianist Liberace was so in tune with his beloved mother that he bought her identical baubles and furs so she could sit in the audience wearing exactly what he was wearing on stage.
When interviewing Liberace’s live-in lover, Scott Thorson, Shore noticed that he didn’t look at all like his photographs.
“He told us that Liberace had paid for a series of plastic surgeries, in essence to make Thorson look like Liberace.”
The writer Marcel Proust had a sexual fixation with butchers and enjoyed stabbing rats with hairpins.
That’s major-league weird. It’s just that back then, we didn’t have TV channels, newspapers and magazines devoted to the lifestyles of the rich and fatuous. Still, Musto says, we’re seeing something for the ages in the fragile self-styled King of Pop.
“Sometimes I feel so blessed to be living through this,” he said. “I do feel like we are witnessing the most compelling freak show in pop history. It’s like a future chapter of “Hollywood Babylon’ that’s unfurling before our eyes. Jacko will definitely be the high-water mark for weird for centuries to come.”
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AP-NY-12-24-03 1256EST
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