Also by Randall Sullivan
The Price of Experience
LAbyrinth
The Miracle Detective
For Elaine Veronica Sullivan
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
-from Self-Consciousness by John Updike
The inception of this book was an e-mail sent to me by Will Dana, the managing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, in late June 2009 that read, "Are you ready to drop everything and do the big Michael Jackson piece?" After thinking it over for twenty-four hours, I said yes, and flew to Los Angeles, where Michael had died just a few days earlier. During the next several weeks, and in the course of conversations with editors at Rolling Stone, I realized that most people thought they knew quite a lot about the life Michael Jackson had lived up until the time his criminal trial on charges of child molestation ended with an acquittal in June 2005, but that he seemed in their minds to have disappeared into some sort of twilight zone during the four years afterward, at least up until the time of the announcement of his "This Is It" shows at the O2 Arena in London during March 2009. So the idea became to provide an account of those last four years that would somehow also be the story of his life, with the details of his first forty-five years "brush stroked in," as somebody-maybe it was me-put it.
By the time I realized that what had begun as a magazine article was turning into a book, I was committed to that structure and it still felt right to me. I knew, of course, that I would need more than brush strokes to tell the story of the first nine-tenths of Michael's life in what purported to be a biography, but I still wanted the story of his final five years to be the crux of the work.
I began to imagine the structure of this book as a spyglass telescope, made of three sections, or tubes, that fitted over one another, and could be extended or retracted as needed. The first tube, the one closest to the eye, would contain the lens that examined those years after the criminal trial, when Michael was a kind of Flying Dutchman wandering the globe, his three children in tow, searching for a new home he never found. The second tube, a bit further from the eye, would need to be fitted, I thought, with the lens I used to study the circumstances that led to the criminal charges against him, including the Martin Bashir documentary, Living with Michael Jackson that ran on ABC, the raid on Neverland Ranch, his arrest, and his trial. Then I realized that this second tube would have to reach at least back to 2001, when his "30th Anniversary" concerts coincided with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Finally, I understood that the length of this second tube was really the twelve years between 1993 and 2005, when Michael's life, and his public reputation, were gradually destroyed by two very public accusations of sexually abusing children.
The Michael Jackson who existed after August 1993 was a different Michael Jackson than the one who had existed before then, so the story of those years is key to understanding his life, and needed to be told in some considerable detail. I would have to research and write a chronicle of the two main events that bookended those years, the Jordan Chandler scandal that broke in 1993 and the criminal trial that took place in 2005, that both encompassed and eclipsed anything previously published.
The third and most distant tube would house the lens that provided my view of Michael's life up to 1993, the first thirty-five years of his youth, his rise to fame, his reign as the King of Pop and his transformation into the person the tabloid media called "Wacko Jacko"-in other words, the story of Michael Jackson that most people thought they knew. It would be necessary to rely largely on the public record for this section that I would be telling as, essentially, backstory, but I would have the advantage of filtering this through the two other lenses of the telescope and thus through the sources that had helped me construct them, some of those being people whose relationships with Michael had lasted decades. Plus, circumstances had arranged themselves in such a way that I was provided with a level of access to the inner workings of the Jackson family in the post-Michael era that no writer had ever or was ever likely to be granted again, and that was a blessing.
This last development was concurrent with my realization that there was a yet a fourth piece to my telescope, and that this was the perspective of all that had taken place in the months and years after Michael's death, the celebration of and the struggle for his legacy and his estate. This fourth piece I came to imagine as fitting snugly over the first tube and thus becoming the part that was pressed against my flesh, containing the concave eyepiece that created my telescope's magnification.
So in a way, I told myself, I was writing four Michael Jackson biographies. I could even claim that the total was five biographies, or even six. Knowing that many people might wish for a more conventional account of Michael's life, I created the timeline that I consider an essential aspect of this book, laying out the story of Michael Jackson in chronological fashion, from beginning to end. And then there are, of course, my chapter notes, which not only describe how I wrote the book, but how I sorted the mass of conflicting information about Michael Jackson to deliver what I hope will be a definitive chronicle.
So there you have it, as good a description as I can offer of what I've done, and why.
