In grade seven, every girl, every cool girl, I should say, sported the feathered hairstyle of Farrah Fawcett. Still, in spite of the fact that she was the most famous of Charlie’s Angels, the most noticeably American, she was probably the least favourite amongst my peers. The truth was that in spite of her obvious beauty, she didn’t arouse any sexual curiosity. That was a job for Wonder Woman, Daisy Duke or Chrissy Snow. Farrah was more of a trophy, built for status rather than sex, she was the girl you hoped to take to the dance rather than lose your virginity to. As sexless as a Barbie doll, she was destined to go out with He-Men like Lee Majors and Ryan O’Neal, never seeing beyond the homogenously perfect Alpha couple that was reflected back.
Later in her career, she tried to change this image and become a sex bomb, but it never really took. Her efforts made her seem desperate and weird(her Playboy apprearance at 50 where she slithered around in paint), in the style of an aging Hollywood celebrity with nowhere to go, and in short order, after her surreal appearance on Letterman, she was a laughing stock. This was sad, rather than actually funny, and what was clear from her performance, was just how desperately she craved and needed attention. Whether it was good or bad attention was completely immaterial. She was over 50, and never having had to cultivate an evolved sense of maturity or grace because of the immediate attention her looks had always demanded, found herself lost. Her native beauty having been corrupted, she was then spit out by the cruelly indifferent machinations of celebrity.
In 1983, when I was in high school, Michael Jackson appeared on the 25th Anniversary Motown Special. I was over at a friend’s house with a whole bunch of kids getting ready to go out. None of us wanted to watch the show, but the father, who was having a good time, made us stay for one more song.
It was Michael Jackson. Looking like a glittering Prince of Persia, he performed Billie Jean, and it was, to say the least, electrifying. People in the audience were standing and waving their arms about, their spontaneous cheers punctuating the song in perfect rhythm. It was a long performance by TV standards, more than five minutes, and as it proceeded, a kind of tension built, and then suddenly, when he did his moonwalk, introducing it to the world for the first time, all of that tension was released in one graceful and entirely alien passage of movement. The audience in Motown, and all of us in my neighbour’s basement, went absolutely insane. It was magic.
It was a moment of cultural evolution. Suddenly, something nobody had seen before or even imagined, came into being in front of millions of people at the same time. The next day at school there was nothing else to talk about. There was nothing else to do but try to master the moonwalk. I swear, this went on for a year, and people of my age, will still try to moonwalk when drunk.
Feeling sentimental, I looked back even further than that seminal performance of Billie Jean, and came across the Jackson 5 performing on the Ed Sullivan show in 1969. Michael was 10 years old and beautiful. He was charming and so abundantly full of talent that the light practically radiated out of him, and I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that his presence was some sort of gift.
None of us can ever understand the forces that shape the arc of a life. How he was transformed from the pure, radiant genius of childhood to the sad and broken-down 50 year-old that he was at his death is ultimately unknowable. Forces our elected celebrities can’t imagine or possibly predict, bend and manipulate them, draining them of that which we initially loved, until there is nothing left, but their need to be loved.
It’s a principle of physics that nature knows no extinction, only the transference of energy. When I think of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, I think now of all that they poured out into the world, all the ideas, fantasies and images that helped fuel millions of lives that very likely turned out far happier than those of the stars themselves.