Everett, Wash.
Published: Thursday, June 25, 2009

Update: Michael Jackson dead at 50

Paramedics found Jackson in cardiac arrest.

Los Angeles Times

 LOS ANGELES — Michael Jackson, a seminal figure in music, dance and culture whose ever-changing face graced the covers of albums that sold more than a half-billion copies, died today, shortly after going into cardiac arrest at his Holmby Hills chateau.

He was 50 years old.

He spent much of his life as among the world’s most famous people, and to many, his death felt unthinkable and, oddly, inevitable.

Paramedics found Jackson in cardiac arrest when they arrived at his home shortly before 12:30 p.m., three minutes and 17 seconds after receiving a 911 call. His personal physician already was in the house performing CPR.

Jackson was not breathing, and it appears he never regained consciousness. Paramedics treated Jackson at the house for 42 minutes, and he was declared dead at 2:26 p.m. at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center, about two miles from his home.

Los Angeles police said detectives would launch an investigation of the death. They cautioned, however, that they do not believe Jackson was the victim of foul play and that the investigation is standard after the death of a person with this level of fame. Among the factors investigators said they would examine is any medication Jackson might have been taking; an autopsy will be performed Friday.

Jackson’s death was confirmed outside the hospital by one of his brothers, Jermaine, who once performed alongside Michael as a member of The Jackson 5, a family act that began in the down-and-out steel mill town of Gary, Ind., before exploding in the music industry.

Jackson — who most famously resided in the Santa Ynez Valley at his Neverland Valley Ranch, named for the island where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys were in no danger of growing up — had taken up residence for the rehearsals in a seven-bedroom estate near Bel Air, which he rented for $100,000 a month.

He had come to town to rehearse for 50 sold-out concerts in London, a run of shows scheduled to kick off July 13 that had been dubbed “This Is It.” The concerts were to have been the start of an ambitious career resuscitation designed to begin wiping out Jackson’s staggering debt — he was at least $400 million in debt and would have earned $1 million a night — and return the singer to cultural relevancy.

Jackson’s backers, concert promoter AEG Live and financier Tom Barrack of Colony Capital envisioned the London appearances as an audition of sorts for a reboot that would go on to include a world tour, movies, a Graceland-like museum, new music and revues in Macau and Las Vegas.

Those close to Jackson have said he had been working diligently to get in shape for his comeback. A year ago, he was gaunt and used a wheelchair, but recently he had been exercising with a trainer in addition to daylong rehearsals with dancers half his age. “He’s in great shape,” his manager, Frank DiLeo, said last month.

Johnny Caswell, a principal at Centerstaging, a Burbank soundstage where Jackson had been rehearsing, watched many of the run-throughs and said he was “absolutely shocked” by the performer’s death. Jackson, he said, was “very frail” but approached the rehearsals with boundless energy. “He was working hard,” Caswell said.

In order for promoters to get insurance for the London shows, Jackson underwent a four-hour physical with an independent doctor this spring. Rand Phillips, the chief executive of AEG Live, said that the medical screening uncovered “no issues whatsoever.”

Jackson’s financial and legal woes had turned him into a object of fascination, pity and revulsion in recent years. Still, it would be difficult to overstate Jackson’s effect on Western culture — although Guinness World Records did its best, asserting that it had concluded, objectively, that Jackson was the “Most Successful Entertainer of All Time.”

From the late 1960s, when he burst into popularity as a fresh-faced boy, Jackson’s career was an engine that drove the maturation of American pop.

Over the years, the times and the tastes called for earnest ballads, then soul, then buoyant disco, then synthesizers, then dance tracks, and Jackson seemed hard-wired to deliver, particularly during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when he was dubbed “the King of Pop.” When music videos became a backbone of the industry, Jackson delivered again, turning himself into a zombie during a 13-minute video for the song “Thriller” that opened new horizons for imagery used to accompany pop music.

The 1982 album that song came from, also called “Thriller,” produced seven major hits and remained in the top 10 of the pop charts for 80 weeks. Along the way, Jackson’s moves and clothes became instantly recognizable — his moonwalk, his sequined glove, his faux-military jackets.

“It’s almost impossible to top that kind of success,” said Tommy Mottola, who oversaw Jackson’s career for 16 years as a head of Sony Music.

But in later years, Jackson seemed to mirror, too, the newer, darker traditions of American celebrity — living in excess, in danger, in public.

Some of the salacious rumors that circled around him were not true. It does not appear that Jackson, contrary to popular myth, bought the Elephant Man’s bones. Nor, he insisted, did he bleach his skin; Jackson was diagnosed in the 1980s with vitiligo and lupus, requiring treatments that made his skin — along with the pancake makeup he applied to just go to the mall — increasingly pale.

But the tabloids weren’t all wrong.

Over the years, interviews, court papers and documentaries revealed a barrage of strange and destructive behavior. Jackson reportedly became addicted to painkillers, sedatives and more, and he was forced into drug rehab. There was a failed marriage, to Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’ daughter. Plastic surgery and severe weight loss dramatically altered his appearance; his nose, in particular, seemed in danger of disappearing altogether.

Then, in 2003, after the release of a documentary in which Jackson was seen holding hands and arranging sleepovers with a teenage boy — and after years of murmurs that Jackson had cultivated unusual relationships with children — Jackson was charged with seven counts of child sexual abuse.

His fans and defenders — among them Elizabeth Taylor — argued that Jackson was, in effect, still a child. Indeed, during Jackson’s five-month trial in Santa Maria, one doctor determined that Jackson had become a regressed 10-year-old boy and was not a pedophile. In May 2005, he was acquitted on all counts, but his career had never recovered.

“Michael lived a tortured life,” Mottola said. “With his successes came all the pressures. ... Imagine living with that stress on a minute-to-minute, day-by-day basis. And that’s going on in life from the age of 5 or 6 to 50. It’s almost shocking he made it through this long.”

Jackson’s comeback, Mottola said, represented “a very important platform for him to bridge the old and new.” But Jackson also needed the comeback to reverse the damage done by years of excessive spending and little work. He had not toured since 1997 or released a new album since 2001, but he had continued to live like a megastar.

To finance his opulent lifestyle, he borrowed heavily against his three main assets: his Neverland Ranch, his music catalog and a second catalog that includes the music of the Beatles co-owned with Sony Corp. By the time of his criminal trial, he was spending $30 million more annually than he was taking in. Compounding his money difficulties were a revolving door of litigious advisors and hangers-on. Jackson had run through 11 managers since 1990, according to DiLeo, his manager and friend of three decades.

AEG spent more than $20 million to mount the London shows, flying in dancers to audition and hiring top-notch talent to facilitate the singer’s comeback. Kenny Ortega, the force behind “High School Musical” and “Dirty Dancing,” was brought on as the concerts’ director. The promoters proposed to Jackson a three-year tour to begin in Europe before traveling to Asia and then the United States. Jackson had committed only to the London performances.

Phillips estimated that ticket sales for the world tour might have exceeded $450 million with Jackson netting about half of that.

“For the first time, he had a big financial base behind him,” said Dr. Tohme Tohme, an orthopedic surgeon-turned-businessman who was once Jackson’s spokesman and confidant.

Mottola suggested that the demands of preparing for the tour might have been too much.
Tonight, UCLA Medical Center turned into a zoo. Authorities pleaded with fans and onlookers to avoid the area, to no avail. A huge crowd, including some people wearing costumes reminiscent of Jackson’s performance outfits, gathered. Across the street, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house blasted Jackson’s music. A group of young girls sobbed, blocking an emergency room driveway until police ushered them aside.

Near nightfall, as the crowd continued to swell, authorities flew Jackson’s body from the hospital to the nearby coroner’s office by helicopter.

Additional links:

www.latimes.com

www.tmz.com
© 2009The Daily Herald Co., Everett, WA