June 26, 2009. Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day in New York.
The news however, was out in Hollywood. Farrah Fawcett had died in the early morning at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica hours after a long battle with cancer. A few hours later in mid-afternoon came the shocking news that Michael Jackson had died suddenly a few miles away at the UCLA Medical Center.
It was not clear what initiated the coma he was in when found – alone -- at the house he was renting in nearby Holmby Hills -- although a lot of people seemed to have a pretty good guess.
Both performers were “icons” of their age although Michael Jackson’s career was longer – having started in early childhood – and more spectacular beyond any comparison as the pop icon of his generation, with millions of fans all over the world.
“For a movie star,” Debbie Reynolds wrote in her memoir, “ultimately there really is no such thing as Hollywood. It’s a name and it’s a map. It’s not an industry. It’s a very fickle business where you’re here today and gone tomorrow. After one hell of a ride.”
I never met Farrah in the years I lived out there, although I can still recall the sunny late summer weekday afternoon, pulling out of the parking lot of the market, on the corner of Doheny and Santa Monica, in line behind a mass of blonde hair in a shiny new silver blue Mercedes convertible with the top down. Traffic on the road was stopped for a light. When it changed and the Mercedes turned onto the roadway, the blonde turned her head in my direction. It was as if all the lights on the set went on at once: it was Farrah, ready for her closeup, looking as beautiful and glamorous as any one of her photographs. She was astonishing; a fan’s feelings.
In Hollywood, especially in the western part of the city from West Hollywood on to the beach, you are more likely to see stars, especially in their cars. And it’s always a kick to spot that so familiar face. It’s the mystique of stardom and it can grab anybody.
Often they look a little more real than those images on the screen which have been lit and brushed and made up to mesmerize you. Farrah looked like that that late afternoon waiting in traffic like the rest of us.
Never knowing her, I never knew about her life, except what I read in the papers and in the gossip rags. The glamour is mainly in the lights and the lens. Hollywood lives are often extraordinarily ordinary outside of the work and the ballyhoo. And very often very isolated. And lonely. It’s a life about The Work. And it’s all consuming, one way or another.
I never met Michael Jackson. I saw him a couple of times at benefits out there. The most memorable was one evening in 1990 at Merv Griffin’s Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, produced by David Gest (the now former husband of Liza Minnelli). Mr. Gest produced this annual convocation of movie celebrity and called it the American Cinema Awards at which each year he’d honor a star.
His roster was always made up of big names but names whose careers had mainly waned and faded with time. Of the five or six hundred guests, half were “names,” and although mostly of yore, names who support our fascination. At the end of the road, stardom belongs to the fans, never the stars.
That night the American Cinema Awards began with the emcee reading off the treasure trove of Hollywood names in the room – many who had been household words when I was a kid. This one evening was probably the greatest moment of the ACA’s history: the Honorees were Michael Jackson and Gregory Peck.
An Idol and a Legend. And Elizabeth Taylor, coming out of her self-enforced retirement and seclusion. And in attendance, participating in the presentations were, among others, Lauren Bacall, Jane Fonda, Farley Granger, Celeste Holm, Whitney Houston, Tab Hunter, Jermaine Jackson, Van Johnson, Sophia Loren (who presented the award to Gregory Peck), Roddy McDowall, Patricia Neal, Maureen O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Taylor (who was presenting to Michael Jackson), Ruth Warrick, Andy Williams, Shelley Winters, James Woods and Teresa Wright, to name just a few.
This was a great coup for David Gest getting Taylor and Jackson together on a public stage. She was in a down moment, always fascinating to the fans. She had returned to live in Los Angeles after her marriage to Senator John Warner. Returning to her childhood town after being queen of the world, she was overweight and frowsy, and looking more than a little worse for the wear (although she’d recover smashingly as was her wont). Fate and looks aside, the girl was game, and indeed she was, as Michael Jackson told the audience in his tiny, flat speaking voice, his “very close friend.” What seemed like an odd combination to me, the civilian in the outside world, was perfectly practical for the two. They lived in identical spheres, despite the differences in their dramas. It’s the land of Nathaniel West, and these are his characters dressed for the set.
In the early 80s I was working on an autobiographical project with Hermes Pan who was Fred Astaire’s dance collaborator and longtime friend. About that time Michael Jackson got himself introduced to these two men who, although no longer working, had produced possibly the greatest oeuvre of dance performances in the history of film.
Their meeting might have come through Hermes, who was a very sunny man with an elfin-like appreciation of people and dancers especially, and far more congenial and socially accessible than Astaire.
“Dancers,” Hermes once said, “are like children; they have to be in order to get up there and do that.” And then he chuckled at the reality.
I don’t know which of the two men – Hermes and Fred – saw Michael Jackson’s work first but whoever it was, he immediately told the other. Fred Astaire thought Michael Jackson was the greatest dancer of his age. He regarded Michael as his peer. Hermes agreed. He thought Michael was Fred’s natural successor.
After Michael and the two men became friends, Michael one day sent Fred Astaire all of his gold records. Or was it platinum. There were a lot of them and in their frames. Astaire was non-plussed. There was nothing ethereal about the man off-screen, and this sort of thing struck him as bizarre. He sent them back. It did not affect his relationship with Michael, however, because Michael was his peer. Furthermore Fred Astaire was flattered to see that the pop mega-star who he considered the greatest dancer was inspired by certain Astaire dance moves.
I never quite understood that last bit about the dance moves when Hermes mentioned them. Michael Jackson seemed like such a different breed of cat, style-wise, than Fred Astaire to this non-dancer Nevertheless, I knew they knew what they are talking about.
Thinking about that last night, we found couple of clips of the two boys doing their thing, thrilling us masses of millions in their thrall. Coincidentally they bear out what Hermes Pan told me about Michael and Fred and their dancing: they were the resident genius of their time.
Whatever it was for him, it was a tortuous, troubled, and possibly even tragic life for the boy/man, this Nijinsky child who wanted his peers to have his prizes, to gain some camaraderie, to share some space in that strangely lonely place called fame. In summation he was the dancer. The rest of us got the best of him and that will be his legacy. |
