A very small handful of celebrities manage to attain the status of worldwide icon. It’s a combination of raw talent and hidden truths that create the legend of stars like Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Then those conjoined twins, commerce and the media, help them live on decades after their final songs.
Another handful of celebrities reach death before they reach their potential. If you look for them in stardom’s early days, you could begin with Jean Harlow, with her platinum hair and ruby lips, gone at age 26. In the fifties, there was James Dean, the ultimate daredevil rebel, dead at 24. And Buddy Holly, whose plane crash death at 23 was called The Day the Music Died.
The sixties and seventies gave us almost more names than we could list, with a menu of unnatural causes: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Judy Garland, Jim Morrison, Mama Cass, Sam Cooke, Jim Croce, Marvin Gaye, Elvis. Then Lennon in 1980, and on to more recent exits by Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, Tupac, Biggie Smalls, and England’s crown jewel, Princess Di. As far as the American political theater goes, we can just say “Kennedy” and be done with it.
Daughter called from her vacation in California the other day, the day Michael Jackson died. She reported that people were crying in the streets. She herself said the news took her breath away and flooded her with emotion. In many ways, he was the most watched person in the world. Along with being the strangest, the most brilliantly talented, the most impossible to fathom, and at times, even recognize.
I was pregnant with Daughter in 1980 when John Lennon was murdered by a crazed fan in New York City. We were living in a Manhattan apartment building next to the hospital where Lennon died, and where Daughter would be born. Although the sirens had awakened me late at night, I first heard why the next morning while watching the Today show. It was Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw who delivered the shocking news, but it was the entire public that felt its blow. I remember clusters of strangers in the subway hunched together over newspaper headlines, collectively grieving.
There will be much to say and hear about Michael Jackson’s life and death in the coming weeks, months, and decades. Onstage since age five, there are few child stars who grew up to evoke our adoration, fascination, and revulsion as completely as the King of Pop. From his gender and race ambiguity to his towering achievements as an entertainer, from his brutal childhood to a lifetime of bizarre behavior, submerged in a sea of debt and moral shambles at his death, Michael Jackson has now reached a place where he can be worshiped eternally by his fans without having to explain himself. As if he ever could.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos give us Close-Ups
horizon
cracked
drippy drip
salvage boat by abby goodman