I believe that Michael was fundamentally inconsolable. What consoles is friendship and family. He had a father who reputedly was cruel to him, and though he obviously loved his mother, I don’t think he felt like he had a comfortable place in the world. So, he made his own little community with his children.
Michael’s death was as much a by-product of his fame as it was of whatever plagues anyone, whoever that might describe. He died because he could get people—in this case, doctors—to give him something he had no business having. No one but a ridiculously wealthy celebrity could have persuaded a doctor to go against his principles, to risk losing his license. The combination of money and celebrity is a deadly surf and turf. So, Doctor Murray swapped his reputation in exchange for shekels and the ability to say, “I’m Michael Jackson’s doctor.”
What ophthamologist or hair dresser or tattoo artist or sobriety expert wouldn’t love to have his or her profession defined with that addendum: “to the Stars”! For most people that’s just too much to resist. And now he gets to be the doctor that essentially killed Michael Jackson, linked to him for the rest of his otherwise unnoteworthy life. “Manslaughterer to the Stars.”
And this is merely one sad example of the most prevalent subculture in Hollywood, the professionals who provide off-license essentials to the special stars with their oh-so-special needs. Hey! What about in exchange for me allowing you to drop my name and be seen with me on occasion, would you give me a prescription for pills that I don’t need but want really badly? My reality—my sur-reality—has set up housekeeping on my nerves. I’ve been a public person way too much this week and now I’m craving a little private oblivion. Not too many people appreciate what it’s like to be enshrined in the public eye, so now I don’t want to feel like myself, okay? Be a good guy and get me out of me! But then…
Uh-oh! Maybe I stayed out of myself and off my nerves for a little too long now. Could you maybe find me someone to privately detox me? Then you can be the guy who saved me from myself! Hang a photo of us on your wall. Sure, I’ll do your benefit! I’ll even show up at your party!
Basically, Michael’s fame even gave me a little extra stab of celebrity by being in the vague proximity of the scene of the crime of Michael’s life, which ended so early. So much sooner than it should have.
But hey, at least we have the X-Box 360 Kinect Michael Jackson Experience to remember him by. And his music. It’s not much compared to still having Michael. What you’ll have of me after I journey to that great Death Star in the sky is an extremely accomplished daughter, a few books, and a picture of a stern-looking girl wearing some kind of metal bikini lounging on a giant drooling squid, behind a newscaster informing you of the passing of Princess Leia after a long battle with her head.
Waiting for the Shoe (Tycoon) to Drop
If my memories are indeed destined to fade, then let the ones herein contained be among the first to go.
Karl’s Shoe Stores was America’s largest privately held retail shoe chain when Harry Karl took it over from his father in 1952. He was a multimillionaire (a phrase that used to carry the cachet that billionaire does today) when he married my mother, and, over the course of their thirteen-year marriage, managed to lose not just all of his money, but also all of hers, leaving her massively in debt for good measure.
Prior to making her Debbie Reynolds Karl, Harry had been married twice to the singer/actress Marie McDonald, whose nickname was “The Body.” You might conclude from this biographical nugget that he was in possession of some incredible sexual allure. If so, as you’ll soon see, you would be very, very wrong.
I was three when my mother married him. She was never in love with him. The whole point of Harry Karl was that, post–Eddie Fisher, my mother wanted to provide my brother and me with a father who would stay, rather than the kind that would, say, leave and create one of the craziest scandals in Hollywood history. Somehow this translated to her as having to find not just someone who valued faithfulness over infidelity—not that Harry turned out to be such a husband—but someone who was the complete opposite of Eddie in every way.
Eddie Fisher was a quite handsome man. Harry Karl… wasn’t. Eddie Fisher was insanely charming. Harry Karl was so lacking in charm that my guess is this is probably the first sentence ever composed that contains both his name and that word. Eddie was young and did everything with boyish energy and glee. Harry was fairly old (as it happens, the same age I am now) and spent most of his time in bed sleeping. Eddie spent most of his time in bed not sleeping.
Eddie spoke with delight, and when he wasn’t talking passionately, he was singing—the world was his shower, and he used women for soap. Harry neither spoke nor sang—he snored in one end and I don’t know how else to say it other than just say it—farted out the other. Eddie lived in a faux Asian house in Benedict Canyon. Harry—and therefore we—lived at 813 Greenway Drive, a house poised hesitantly on the edge of a golf course, just below Sunset on the western edge of Beverly Hills. It was a massive, embassy-like marble-floored box, possessing all the comforting warmth of a plant that manufactured disinfectant. The dominant color, if it even qualifies as a color, was white.
I’m sure my mom just wanted to live in a nice house—a house that rich people could live in—but coming from the poorest part of the Texas/Mexico border town of El Paso, it was difficult to know exactly what that ought to look like. Not that Harry was to the manner born—he was, as it happens, to the manner boring. However, he’d inherited the business his father had built coming out of World War II, but because he hadn’t taken part in making something out of nothing, he turned out to be better suited to making nothing out of something.
But destroying, really destroying, something (like, for example, your wife’s life), if you want to do it properly, it can take a while. About twelve years in this case, a deceptively comfortable time during which the four of us holed up in our lavish digs unknowingly waiting for the money to run out so we could pack up and then chase after it.
There were bookshelves filled with books that no one read. There was a piano room with a piano that no one played. There was a lanai with a table and chairs and lots of plants and big indoor palm trees that no one went out to sit under, ever, ever, ever. There was a dining room with a huge table and very large seats that resembled electric chairs without the electricity. There was a living room where no one lived, with white couches and chairs, and lots of crystal objects—ashtrays, boxes containing cigarettes, a lighter, figurines of shy nude women—and coffee-table books of great works of art that no one ever perused.
There was a chauffeur, a chef, a nanny, a butler, a laundress, and a guard—all decked out in the appropriate uniforms, just like in the movies. In the breakfast room there was a buzzer under the rug, so my mother could use her foot to call for people who were standing five feet away. That way she didn’t have to strain her vocal cords shouting “MARY!” or “LETHA!” or “YANG!” or “MRS. YANG!” She could just buzz.