The King of Pop trumps many past aces of oddity
caryrjr
In a long line of strange celebs, Jackson reigns.
By Daniel Rubin
Inquirer Staff Writer
Kevork Djansezian/AP
Michael Jackson performs during the taping of the American Bandstand's 50th
anniversary show, April 2002.
Bubbles the chimp. The vanishing nose. The baby, cloaked and dangling. OK,
maybe Michael Jackson's cheese has slipped off the cracker.
Now that he's been formally charged with child molestation, and we're
guaranteed to learn more than we ever wanted to know about the naif of
Neverland, let's consider some other famous pieces of work, past and
present.
Is Jackson the weirdest celebrity who ever lived?
Greta Garbo's biographer, Barry Paris, says the reclusive actress of the
'20s and '30s used to arrange tiny troll tableaus under her living room
couch and was fond of gender-bending pronouncements such as, "I have been
smoking since I was a small boy."
Curmudgeonly W. C. Fields was so worried about losing his money in a bank
collapse that he opened small accounts in almost every town he visited,
usually in the names of his characters and pen names, such as A. Pismo Clam,
Mahatma Kane Jeeves, and Elmer Prettywillie.
Howard Hughes, industrialist, aviator and mogul, spent his last years
growing Fu Manchu nails and being obsessed with germs and the movie Ice
Station Zebra. Convinced he was spied on, he once bought 20 identical
Chevrolets. No one, he reasoned, would bug all 20.
And history has seen more than a few mad scientists. Alexander Graham Bell
tried to teach his dog to talk. And naturalist Charles Darwin? Unnatural.
Locked his wife out of the household drawers and cupboards.
Stephen M. Silverman, news editor of People magazine's Web site, finds the
concept of the eccentric quaint, given the behavior of celebrities these
days.
"Eccentric is almost an antiquated term," he said. "These days we say either
perv or something worse. I just saw Miracle on 34th Street. Now, [Kris
Kringle] is an eccentric. Eccentric is Auntie Mame."
OK, so is anyone more wacko than Jacko?
"I think we'd be hard-pressed to find someone," Silverman said. "Look at
that mug shot. That's not even a deer in the headlights because no
self-respecting deer would look like that. Even Bambi had better people
doing his makeup."
Jackson once earned headlines for his music. Five No. 1 hits burst from his
1982 classic Thriller, which remains the second-best-selling album in
history, with 28 million copies moved in the United States alone. It is hard
to picture music video in the early '80s without seeing "Beat It" and
"Billie Jean," which forced MTV to open its mind to artists of color.
Jackson was the rare recipient of both popular and critical adoration, but
has been on a two-decade slide and is now known by many merely for his
bizarre life.
Michael Musto, a pop-cult columnist for the Village Voice, makes a clear
distinction between celebrity freakiness and criminal conduct. Freakiness,
he says, "I celebrate."
That said, the father of sons Prince Michael I and Prince Michael II is in a
class by himself. "He's encased himself in this bubble which is so removed
from reality, and that's why we have a problem with him," Musto said.
"There's weird, and there's Michael Jackson."
Eccentric, says Musto, is the illustrated man, former basketball rebound
machine Dennis Rodman. Or the ex-Mrs. Billy Bob Thornton, Angelina Jolie,
"before she found her purpose in life" and went goodwill-hunting for the
United Nations.
Jackson, says Musto, goes beyond Elvis (swallowed medicine cabinet, shot
TV), Jerry Lee Lewis (married 13-year-old cuz), or Liberace (more on him
later).
Jeff Shore, who helped create E! Network's True Hollywood Story and
Celebrities Uncensored, believes there are more oddballs in music than
movies or TV because actors are craftsmen, which requires the ability to
work on a firm schedule and film scenes out of order, if necessary.
Musicians? The more off-key the better, Shore says. He supports his argument
with the addled Ozzy Osbourne, who bit the head off a live bat tossed on
stage at a concert, and the head off a dove at a meeting with his record
label. He thought the bat was fake. The dove, he provided himself.
Erik Satie, the French composer, wrote his pieces on scraps of paper, which
he then slipped into the piano and often forgot, Paris said.
Ludwig van Beethoven, who dipped his noggin in cold water before composing,
was so uninterested in cleanliness that his friends used to steal his
clothes and launder them while he slept, according to Karl Shaw's Mammoth
Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics.
And the sequined pianist Liberace was so in tune with his beloved mother
that he bought her identical baubles and furs so she could sit in the
audience wearing exactly what he was wearing on stage.
When interviewing Liberace's live-in lover, Scott Thorson, Shore noticed
that he didn't look at all like his photographs.
"He told us that Liberace had paid for a series of plastic surgeries, in
essence to make Thorson look like Liberace."
Surrealist painter Salvador Dali used to eat ripe Camembert before retiring
in the belief it would make his dreams more vivid.
The writer Marcel Proust had a sexual fixation with butchers and enjoyed
stabbing rats with hairpins.
That's major-league weird. It's just that back then, we didn't have TV
channels, newspapers and magazines devoted to the lifestyles of the rich and
fatuous.
Still, Musto says, we're seeing something for the ages in the fragile
self-styled King of Pop.
"Sometimes I feel so blessed to be living through this," he said. "I do feel
like we are witnessing the most compelling freak show in pop history. It's
like a future chapter of Hollywood Babylon that's unfurling before our eyes.
Jacko will definitely be the high-water mark for weird for centuries to
come."
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/entertainment/gossip/7557401.htm
hungryintruder
"caryrjr" <car...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:jT%Fb.11593$uh1...@bignews6.bellsouth.net...
Makes my habit of only bathing in pools filled with live eels seem much more
normal ;-)
cnd
"hungryintruder" <gues...@unknown.uni> wrote in message
news:10722137...@radsrv1.tranzpeer.net...
> Makes my habit of only bathing in pools filled with live eels seem much
more
> normal ;-)
>
>
Lol! The joys of living in NZ.
No really, I do understand your point. We all have our oddities and weird
habits.
