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And show biz is a part of every scandal. No sexual crime is so disturbing, no career blackmail so heinous, that it cannot be turned into career opportunities and comic mulch. Jackson had not been charged with so much as laying a glove on the boy, yet respected network news divisions were vying with tabloid TV to get the hot skinny. On CBS, This Morning co-anchor Paula Zahn interviewed a "reporter" for the sleaze show Hard Copy. In Britain the rumor rags were resplendent: sicko jacko, cried Thursday's Daily Star ("The Newspaper That Cares"); wacko jacko screamed the Sun. In the U.S. the baiting was a bit more genial. "Suddenly," Howard Stern told his nationwide radio audience, "Pee-wee Herman is an upright citizen." And Jay Leno on the Tonight Show noted, "Someone said when you hear the name Michael Jackson it epitomizes all that's kind and good. So did the name Heidi until a month ago."
In Los Angeles, a company town still cringing from the Heidi Ho' headlines about a Hollywood madam and her yet to be revealed list of star and mogul clients, scandal is a commodity to be both feared and savored. In the rest of the country, the Heidi story was rancid catnip for a slow news summer. But the Michael Jackson story goes deeper -- yes, and deeper than the sad public frolics of Woody Allen a year ago. For as pitiable and lunatic as Jackson's soft eccentricities make him appear in the skeptical public eye, he had surely convinced the world of his devotion to children and his empathy with them. It was as if, deprived of a normal childhood, he wanted to create a paranormal one in his Neverland lab. Bring on the children.
"I love being around them," he wrote in his 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk. "There always seem to be a bunch of kids over at the house, and they're always welcome. They energize me -- just being around them." When he welcomed handicapped kids to the ranch, he was no condescending Lord Bountiful looking for a tax write-off; he was their peer, and they were friends he could play with, sing to -- in the purest sense of the word, love.
AND SLEEP WITH. EVEN BRETT BARNES, an 11-year-old Australian boy who spoke in Jackson's defense, said the star shared a bed, with him. "I was on one side of the bed, and he was on the other," he told KNBC-TV. "It was a big bed." In his TV interview with Oprah Winfrey last February, when asked what he missed in his own childhood, Jackson said, "Slumber parties." He had them with the 13-year-old who made the allegations; indeed, Jackson traveled to Monte Carlo and Walt Disney World with that boy, his half-sister and his mother and, according to the complaint, slept with the boy. Reports indicate that the boy told his therapist that in Monaco Jackson had told him masturbation was "a wonderful thing," lured him into a bathtub and performed oral sex on him, then told him he would be sent to juvenile hall if the extent of the relationship were revealed.