How could something this perfect go wrong?

If ever you want to find the definition of “Liar; pants on fire; playing the lyre while lying around telling lies in the land of Liberia”, you could do worse than look up what 99per cent of famous people say about fame and how they achieved it.

According to practically the whole damn tribe of blushing violets , there they were just minding their own business, helping the blind to cross the road and stuff, when Fame was thrust upon them by a giant hand coming out of the sky.

And, try though they might, they were powerless to resist.

Listen to Keira Knightley — who asked for an agent at the age of three, who has appeared in ads for everything from Chanel perfume to Lux haircare products and who strips off for magazine covers — dissing (working-class) youngsters who (also) crave fame.

“It frightens me when kids go, ‘I want to be rich and famous’,” she told the Radio Times.

“Why? Because you can get into a restaurant? Go and work on the Stock Market!”

Or alternately, get an agent at three, pout like an anorexic goldfish and watch the cash and magazine covers roll in...

The same — in spades — goes for Madonna; a third-rate dancer, fifth-rate singer and, frankly, unclassifiably bad actress who pursued fame and fortune for the past quarter century with all the restraint and dignity of a rat up a drainpipe — only to end up singing whiney cr*p like: “I traded fame for love/ Without a second thought/ It all became a silly game/ Some things cannot be bought/ And now I find/ I’ve changed my mind...”

Then just go, b****, go — and leave us all in peace!

But once in a blue moon comes an entertainer who truly did, through a mixture of talent and parent-driven greed, have fame thrust upon them.

Madonna is 50, Michael Jackson hits 50 tomorrow.

But while they may bear certain superficial resemblances — the woman who refuses to get old, the man who refuses to grow up and the massive plastic surgery that each world-view inevitably leads to — compared to the one-time King Of Pop, the Material Girl is the girl-next-door.

Madonna chased fame ; Jackson had it thrust upon him, and the results have been predictably sad (all that loneliness), mad (all that face fiddling) and very probably bad (all those sleepovers with underage boys, all those out-of-court settlements).

Yet when he first exploded upon the world in October 1969 as the 11-year-old lead singer with the Jackson 5, you would have sworn that here, at last, was a performer so gifted and in love with what he did — talent and ambition at the right proportion, for once — that THIS time there would be no Tragic Entertainer clichés.

The first four Jackson 5 singles — I Want You Back, ABC, The Love You Save and I’ll Be There — were as perfect as pop music had ever sounded, and it was hard to see how something this perfect could ever go wrong.

But what was wrong with this picture was standing side-stage, watching every move five of his nine children made — and calculating the punishments that the seventh-born, the one touched by everyday genius and therefore the golden ticket, would receive after the audience had gone home.

Joe Jackson, the father of the Famous Five, was an unsuccessful R&B performer after his shifts at the steel mill were over — and his bitterness turned a natural desire to see one’s children have better lives than oneself into something wicked.

When we tut-tut over MJ’s eccentric child-raising habits — those masks! That balcony dangling! — we forget just how much “normal” parents used to get away with in “the good old days” under the guise of Wanting The Best For Their Kids while Teaching Them It’s A Tough World Out There.

And unless we judge him as a thrill-seeking sadist, surely this must have been the way Joe Jackson, the father of the clan, justified the consistent physical and mental abuse of his children.

This, according to Michael and other Jackson boys, included incessant rehearsals, whippings, name-calling, being held upside down and punched repeatedly.

“To escape from horror, bury yourself in it,” said some clever old cheese-eating surrender monkey, and when we think of his later obsession with the macabre, what do we make of the fact that when the young Jackson was sleeping one night, his father ENTERED HIS BEDROOM THROUGH THE WINDOW, WEARING A FRIGHT MASK, SCREAMING AND SHOUTING?

Daddy Dearest said he wanted to teach his brood a lesson about not leaving windows open at night. For years afterwards, Jackson suffered nightmares about being kidnapped from his bedroom.

Yet you can imagine Joe Jackson, on first seeing the Thriller video, thinking proudly: “I did that...”

This being where Michael Jackson came from, the question that one school of thought would ask isn’t so much: “Why did it all go wrong?” as “Why did it take so long?’

How did this mangled soul keep it together to make 15 years of great records before collapsing in a heap of nuttiness beyond anything even the crayzee world of showbiz has ever seen?

The other school of thought says Jackson is just another monstrous showbiz baby, throwing his mega-toys — a funfair, a chimp, a Presley — around a huge playpen called Neverland, pampered and cosseted by an army of aides and making 500million dollars in a career spanning almost 40 years.

And that if a grown man sleeps in a bed with children and then pays their angry parents 22million dollars to go away and shut up about it, he was doing more with the kiddies than counting sheep.

Whatever the wrongs and rights of these cases or of his life, what a sad, strange place this man had ended up in.

That kid who sang I Want You Back all those years ago, seemingly so full of the joy of life, has become a broken shadow of a man.

Soon after the end of his trial, the man who had previously aligned himself with the Jew-hating, gay-baiting Nation of Islam (a stranger poster-boy for black supremacy could scarcely be imagined!) fled to the United Arab Emirates, whose various Islamic fiefdoms he was often seen parading around in a burka.

And for once, this most offensive and oppressive of garments seems to make total sense.

What next?

“There are no second acts in American lives,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald — but he wrote it in 1940.

These days, with the poisoned chalice of the reality show comeback, there are second, third and even fourth acts to careers once considered DOA.

Somewhere, surely, there is the mother — and cruel father! — of all reality shows waiting for Michael Jackson.

All he has to do is admit he’s broke, beg our forgiveness — that is, swallow his pride and eat humble pie. Prime-time style.

And who knows — give or take 30 years or so, a blotted copybook or two and a broken spirit, maybe he’ll dance his way into our hearts all over again...


Original article here