There Goes Gravity by Lisa Robinson

Author:Lisa Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

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On March 19, 2001, at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Michael Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Jacksons had been inducted in 1997; now Michael was getting in for his solo work. Wearing tinted glasses, a long white jacket with gold embroidery on the pocket and a black wig, he carried a cane (he had broken his foot, he said, dancing down some stairs). He was heavily made up. Waiting to go onstage, leaning against the wall in the kitchen of the Grand Ballroom—which serves as the “backstage” for this event—Michael was surrounded by huge bodyguards as well as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach who, at that time was, for lack of a better word, his “spiritual” advisor. I caught his eye. “Lisa?” he said. We started to move towards each other and his bodyguards put their hands on my shoulders to start to push me back. “NO! It’s okay,” he said to them forcibly—in that other voice, not the whispered one, not the public one, but rather the one reserved for the lawyers or the record company executives. “I know her. She’s my friend.” It was the last time I ever saw him.

• • •

In 2002, the MTV Awards were held on August 29th, Michael’s birthday. Britney Spears was going to give Michael a cake onstage. In her speech, she called him the “artist of the millennium.” Then Michael came onstage, appeared confused, and “accepted” the nonexistent “Artist of the Millennium Award.” It was embarrassing. But I knew that no matter how whispery and out of it he seemed—or was—he also was totally capable of segueing immediately back into that other voice—the one that belonged to the control freak, the perfectionist.

On December 30, 2006, Michael Jackson was the only star of any magnitude to show up in an Atlanta church for James Brown’s funeral. And, no matter what was going on in his life—the child molestation allegations, the child molestation trial, the plastic surgery, the drugs, the bizarre public persona, the dangling his baby over a hotel balcony—musicians loved him. From Beyoncé to Justin Bieber, they’ve all asked me what he was like. Athletes loved him. Charles Barkley said that when Michael Jackson died, it was like a death in his family. At every photo shoot with a musician that we did over the last decade at Vanity Fair, we played “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” (still my favorite Michael Jackson song). It always put people in a good mood. Black musicians especially, most of whom grew up with Michael’s music (or their parents did), refused to believe the child molestation allegations. He was theirs. When he and his brothers—and the Supremes—were on the Ed Sullivan TV show in the 1960s, as Oprah Winfrey has said, all across America, in black households, families would crowd around their TV sets, call their friends and yell, “Colored on TV!”

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