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The singer had a list of 25 key enemies, including David Geffen and Stephen Spielberg, who featured in a trip to a Malian witch-doctor called Baba in Switzerland in 2000, when for $150,000 Baba promised they would die within the week, and sacrificed 42 cows to ensure it happened. That wasn't Jackson's only brush with voodoo: he had already undergone a bath in sheeps' blood and paid mysterious Egyptian woman Samia $1 million to ease his chronic debts of $250m.
So, a tortured soul driven by his demons to the drugs that claimed his life? According to some of those who knew him, his freaky preoccupations should fool no one. It is, they say, all about the fame and fortune.
"Michael Jackson is about as crazy as Colin Powell," says Scottish photographer Harry Benson, who has worked extensively with Jackson. "He knows everything he is doing. He holds his baby over the balcony and everybody goes crazy,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but he's in every newspaper around the world.
'In a crowd, I'm afraid. Onstage, I feel safe. If I could, I would sleep on the stage'
HERE are two Michael Jacksons. One is Wacko Jacko, the flawed but essentially harmless idiot savant. He was a man-child who recoiled from the pressure of super-stardom,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], finding solace in epic shopping sprees and a fantasy recreation of the childhoodADVERTISEMENT
he never had, a man only ever completely at ease with guileless children and dumb animals. All this righteous angel was missing was a halo.
Then there is the other Michael Jackson, the sinister predator whose youthful spirit was systematically crushed by his father, and who in turn dominated and abused young boys, regaining his innocence by besmirching theirs. This is the venal, narcissistic manipulator who, far from indulging in bizarre flights of fancy, threw up a carefully-crafted smokescreen of eccentricity in the certain knowledge that it would shield the real him, the self-obsessed materialist him, from view. This was the unrepentant sinner with a God-complex; a man with a cruel, dark heart.
The truth probably lies somewhere between those extremes,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but only now that Jackson is dead will the clichés crumble and the wall of silence subside,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], allowing a more nuanced story to emerge. Only now that Jackson's highly-paid lawyers and private investigators are no longer on the case, and the confidentiality clauses in contracts no longer enforceable, will the story be told by those who knew him best. The dam has burst, we can expect a wave of testimony to follow.
"No one knows the truth," said Jackson in 1987. "No one knows what, or who, I am. And the longer it takes them to discover this, the more famous I will be."
And now a further truth needs to be known - the truth of how the world's greatest entertainer died. What should we deduce about a man whose monthly budget in 2000 included a $10,000 standing charge to a Beverly Hills pharmacy? Perhaps we had an answer of sorts on Friday when a white coffin was loaded into a Los Angeles coroner's hearse and Jackson's personal doctor was questioned about the injection of Demerol, a morphine-like drug, given shortly before the 50-year-old stopped breathing.
After a three-hour postmortem on Friday, the coroner ruled out foul play. Initial reports suggested that after the injection, the singer had collapsed and suffered cardiac arrest. The doctor had been the only person with him yet failed to sign a death certificate and promptly disappeared. He was, however, in touch with the police and coroners yesterday.
Those who surrounded Jackson are not out of the woods just yet. Tests,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], including a toxicology report, have been ordered and could take up to six weeks. Their results are widely expected to reveal the full extent of his epic drug-taking and colour our perception of Jackson just as details of the sad final days of Elvis, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe indelibly skewed our memories of them.
HERE are two Michael Jacksons. One is Wacko Jacko, the flawed but essentially harmless idiot savant. He was a man-child who recoiled from the pressure of super-stardom, finding solace in epic shopping sprees and a fantasy recreation of the childhood
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Then there is the other Michael Jackson, the sinister predator whose youthful spirit was systematically crushed by his father, and who in turn dominated and abused young boys,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], regaining his innocence by besmirching theirs.
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