Anyway, a few years after the first grotesque, untrue claims, Arnie Klein’s birthday came around and he invited us to Michael’s Neverland Ranch to celebrate this event with Arnie’s multi-bear clan. It wasn’t clear whether or not we were going to see Michael, or even if he was there. We were there as Arnie’s guests. But then that night we got called into the house. Or maybe it was more like summoned.
We found ourselves walking into this dark, cave-like room with dark sofas, curtains drawn, an enormous sound system—all that seemed to be missing was a crystal disco ball. And in the midst of all this was Michael, clad in white pajamas with animals on them. He told us that he had stayed up all night in this room, dancing. That being one of the few things that gave him pleasure. He’d go to this gigantic dark room at his ranch and stay there by himself, dancing to music all night long. I think that for Michael, this was a way to be okay. Among other things, I think it was one of the ways people could not get at him. When he was inside his music, it all made sense. The music took care of him. It was one of the few things that didn’t want something from him. It wrapped him up in sound and sailed him away to where he could be safe. Music may have been his truest friend, the only one he could truly trust. Pretentious? Maybe, but that doesn’t make it any less true, does it?
Aerial view of the Rue de la Paix, Paris, 1789. Dr. Arnold Klein (center).
Cut to another night, the following year. I was up at Elizabeth Taylor’s house where we would then head off to an AIDS benefit in Beverly Hills. Our little group was composed of Elizabeth and Michael with their double-date happening to be . . . Shirley MacLaine and myself.
Part of Michael’s relationship with Elizabeth was to buy her jewelry—you might say it was even a big part of their relationship. Elizabeth liked getting jewelry. But then really, who doesn’t? I remember coming into her dressing room one time and she was wearing this diamond as big as a doorknob that she always wore—the famous diamond Burton had given her. “What did you do to get that?” I asked her. And she smiled sweetly and softly said, “I was loved.”
So there we were, Shirley, Elizabeth, Michael, and me in a limousine driving to the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Our car drove up to the entrance, the car door opened, the four of us spilled out in front of the paparazzi, and Shirley and I were instantly rendered invisible. We were rendered unrecognizable. Michael’s and Elizabeth’s combined celebrity was just so incredibly intense. It was shine squared. And in a way it may have been comforting for each of them to have found someone with equivalent unimaginable celebrity. A rare species—endangered, protected, shiny—shared an uncommon denominator. And after all isn’t that something we all want—community?
This, I think, is largely why Michael would spend time with Elizabeth. They had something amazingly unique in common. They were both stars from a very early age. Which is tantamount to being pulled out of the general community really early on and taken away from anything relatable. Obviously this is a high-class problem, but that doesn’t make it any less of something to deal with, does it?
So if that happened to you, who knows, you might want to be around children, too. Children who don’t understand enough to get weirded out by you. Who just know people are people. Who knows?
That night, at the AIDS benefit, Shirley and I ended up being spectators to the spectacle of Michael and Elizabeth. All you can really do in a situation like that is watch. And both Shirley and I are celebrities who write, who document, who observe, who in a way feel pulled out of situations that pull you out anyway. Sort of like war reporters on the front lines of celebrity.
But whatever we were like, perhaps one of the reasons Michael was comfortable with me was that, in a way, we could understand a part of each other that nobody else could. The Princess and the King. Leia and Pop. Maybe. Or maybe we never knew each other at all. Who knows? And who maybe even gives a shit, ultimately.
On Christmas Eve 2008—Michael’s last—I went over to his house, which is located just down the hill from me and a few blocks over. He was giving his children the childhood that he never had. A childhood outside of celebrity with people who didn’t objectify them. Because normally, for Michael, life was like being an animal at the zoo. An endangered species forever behind bars. I could get in the cage with Michael and not get freaked out, and there weren’t that many people who would’ve known how to, or known that it was even something they might actually be required to do when with him. But I did.
So I joined Michael after hours at his zoo. We took pictures and ate cookies and decorated the tree.
And then, to change it up, Michael asked me to do the Star Wars hologram speech for his kids. I didn’t mind. Someone actually had to remind me what a big Star Wars fan Michael was.
While I was there, though, we weren’t really experiencing the situation for the most part, we were taking pictures of it. Arnie took pictures of me and Michael and the kids, and I took pictures of Arnie and his friends and the Michael family package. My favorite was taking a picture of Michael reading my book Wishful Drinking.
I will always cherish that weird Christmas configuration of ours. Looking back, it was as if Michael didn’t know how to just be in a situation without recording it on a camera. The thing is, he was just so used to being documented. But the main reason the documentation came up this time was mostly for Arnie’s friends, who wanted to take pictures of their meeting with Michael so they could carry his shine around. The encounter elevated them. It became, “Oh, I had Christmas Eve dinner with Michael Jackson. What did you do?” Anyway, we all fucked around holiday style and having fun, and it was fun. We took pictures, we acted childish (at least I think that’s what it was). At some point, Michael said, “Okay, I’m letting you take my kids’ pictures because I know that you won’t show them to anyone because you know I don’t want anyone to see my children.”
He wanted his children to be as unrecorded as possible. If the Africans believe that you lose a piece of your soul each time you have your picture taken, then Michael hadn’t had one for a very long time. But he was trying to arrange things so that his kids could keep theirs. And his children are very sweet, good children. And that’s because whatever else he was or wasn’t, I think Michael was a really good father. I mean, his children are kind, really polite, even-tempered, and essentially unspoiled kids. And that can’t come from a nanny. You can’t fake that stuff. It has to come from the parent. And that parent was Michael.
Soon after that, Michael sent me a present—a phone. And just like with the soap I stole from Neverland, I lost it.
Michael couldn’t do any of the things that normal people do because as soon as he got involved with them, they became toxic with focus pulling, contaminated with shine. And I guess the only times where he could not feel pulled at and objectified was when he listened to the music all night and danced, or when he was being a father.
Michael was this creature that entertained us and then baffled us. I don’t think he was a drug addict in a conventional way. I think he just wanted out sometimes. And “out” could be dancing by himself all night to music. Or “out” could be anesthesia, which in my vast experience is not a drug. It provides no high, just nothingness, which must have seemed tremendously appealing to him. To sleep, perchance not to be misunderstood, get used, have your privates photographed by the police.
I believe that Michael was fundamentally inconsolable. What consoles is friendship and family. He had a father who reputedly was cruel to him, and though he obviously loved his mother, I don’t think he felt like he had a comfortable place in the world. So, he made his own little community with his children.
Michael’s death was as much a by-product of his fame as it was of whatever plagues anyone, whoever that might describe. He died because he could get people—in this case, doctors—to give him something he had no business having. No one but a ridiculously wealthy celebrity could have persuaded a doctor to go against his principles, to risk losing his license. The combination of money and celebrity is a
deadly surf and turf. So, Doctor Murray swapped his reputation in exchange for shekels and the ability to say, “I’m Michael Jackson’s doctor.”
What ophthamologist or hair dresser or tattoo artist or sobriety expert wouldn’t love to have his or her profession defined with that addendum: “to the Stars”! For most people that’s just too much to resist. And now he gets to be the doctor that essentially killed Michael Jackson, linked to him for the rest of his otherwise unnoteworthy life. “Manslaughterer to the Stars.”
And this is merely one sad example of the most prevalent subculture in Hollywood, the professionals who provide off-license essentials to the special stars with their oh-so-special needs. Hey! What about in exchange for me allowing you to drop my name and be seen with me on occasion, would you give me a prescription for pills that I don’t need but want really badly? My reality—my sur-reality—has set up housekeeping on my nerves. I’ve been a public person way too much this week and now I’m craving a little private oblivion. Not too many people appreciate what it’s like to be enshrined in the public eye, so now I don’t want to feel like myself, okay? Be a good guy and get me out of me! But then . . .
Uh-oh! Maybe I stayed out of myself and off my nerves for a little too long now. Could you maybe find me someone to privately detox me? Then you can be the guy who saved me from myself! Hang a photo of us on your wall. Sure, I’ll do your benefit! I’ll even show up at your party!
Basically, Michael’s fame even gave me a little extra stab of celebrity by being in the vague proximity of the scene of the crime of Michael’s life, which ended so early. So much sooner than it should have.
But hey, at least we have the X-Box 360 Kinect Michael Jackson Experience to remember him by. And his music. It’s not much compared to still having Michael. What you’ll have of me after I journey to that great Death Star in the sky is an extremely accomplished daughter, a few books, and a picture of a stern-looking girl wearing some kind of metal bikini lounging on a giant drooling squid, behind a newscaster informing you of the passing of Princess Leia after a long battle with her head.
Waiting for the Shoe (Tycoon) to Drop
If my memories are indeed destined to fade, then let the ones herein contained be among the first to go.
Karl’s Shoe Stores was America’s largest privately held retail shoe chain when Harry Karl took it over from his father in 1952. He was a multimillionaire (a phrase that used to carry the cachet that billionaire does today) when he married my mother, and, over the course of their thirteen-year marriage, managed to lose not just all of his money, but also all of hers, leaving her massively in debt for good measure.
Prior to making her Debbie Reynolds Karl, Harry had been married twice to the singer/actress Marie McDonald, whose nickname was “The Body.” You might conclude from this biographical nugget that he was in possession of some incredible sexual allure. If so, as you’ll soon see, you would be very, very wrong.
I was three when my mother married him. She was never in love with him. The whole point of Harry Karl was that, post–Eddie Fisher, my mother wanted to provide my brother and me with a father who would stay, rather than the kind that would, say, leave and create one of the craziest scandals in Hollywood history. Somehow this translated to her as having to find not just someone who valued faithfulness over infidelity—not that Harry turned out to be such a husband—but someone who was the complete opposite of Eddie in every way.
Eddie Fisher was a quite handsome man. Harry Karl . . . wasn’t. Eddie Fisher was insanely charming. Harry Karl was so lacking in charm that my guess is this is probably the first sentence ever composed that contains both his name and that word. Eddie was young and did everything with boyish energy and glee. Harry was fairly old (as it happens, the same age I am now) and spent most of his time in bed sleeping. Eddie spent most of his time in bed not sleeping.
Eddie spoke with delight, and when he wasn’t talking passionately, he was singing—the world was his shower, and he used women for soap. Harry neither spoke nor sang—he snored in one end and I don’t know how else to say it other than just say it—farted out the other. Eddie lived in a faux Asian house in Benedict Canyon. Harry—and therefore we—lived at 813 Greenway Drive, a house poised hesitantly on the edge of a golf course, just below Sunset on the western edge of Beverly Hills. It was a massive, embassy-like marble-floored box, possessing all the comforting warmth of a plant that manufactured disinfectant. The dominant color, if it even qualifies as a color, was white.
I’m sure my mom just wanted to live in a nice house—a house that rich people could live in—but coming from the poorest part of the Texas/Mexico border town of El Paso, it was difficult to know exactly what that ought to look like. Not that Harry was to the manner born—he was, as it happens, to the manner boring. However, he’d inherited the business his father had built coming out of World War II, but because he hadn’t taken part in making something out of nothing, he turned out to be better suited to making nothing out of something.
But destroying, really destroying, something (like, for example, your wife’s life), if you want to do it properly, it can take a while. About twelve years in this case, a deceptively comfortable time during which the four of us holed up in our lavish digs unknowingly waiting for the money to run out so we could pack up and then chase after it.
Omaha Beach, two days (left) and five days (right) after the landings. June 1943 (sic).
Map of Singapore forest rails, empowering local community to achieve sustainable development.
Yes.
X-rays of the lower mandible of female dolphin.
There were bookshelves filled with books that no one read. There was a piano room with a piano that no one played. There was a lanai with a table and chairs and lots of plants and big indoor palm trees that no one went out to sit under, ever, ever, ever. There was a dining room with a huge table and very large seats that resembled electric chairs without the electricity. There was a living room where no one lived, with white couches and chairs, and lots of crystal objects—ashtrays, boxes containing cigarettes, a lighter, figurines of shy nude women—and coffee-table books of great works of art that no one ever perused.
There was a chauffeur, a chef, a nanny, a butler, a laundress, and a guard—all decked out in the appropriate uniforms, just like in the movies. In the breakfast room there was a buzzer under the rug, so my mother could use her foot to call for people who were standing five feet away. That way she didn’t have to strain her vocal cords shouting “MARY!” or “LETHA!” or “YANG!” or “MRS. YANG!” She could just buzz.
My brother and I had our own rooms, but for many years we slept in the master bedroom with Harry and my mother because it was one of the few times we could spend time with our mom, who worked almost all the time. These were the early prehistoric days of Hollywood, when people were under contract to studios, casting couches were still in use, and there were no twelve-hour turnaround union rules, so she was home usually on weekends during which time she needed a lot of rest so she could start all over again at dawn Monday morning. If you think of the house as a big letter, we all slept in the little postage stamp up in the corner. Harry and my mother in the bed, Todd on a lavender silk couch by the window under his blue blanket, while I slept on the white carpet on my mother’s side of the bed, huddled under my pink blanket. It was a multimillion-dollar mansion, but we lived in it as though it was a shack in the Appalachians.
Here are a few other recollections I have about Harry:
Before he drove Karl Shoes into the ground, he named a shoe after me (the Lady Carrie) and one for my brother (the Lord Todd).
He smoked about five packs of cigarettes a day. His head was always surrounded by a cloud of smoke, under which he was constantly coughing.
He walked very, very slowly, as befitted a man who did so much smoking and coughing.
He had a diamond pocket watch with a chain attached to his belt loop and a diamond clasp in the shape of the letter H. Harry was very bi
g on monograms, possessing HK shirts, HK jackets, and HK shoes.
He drove a deep green Bentley that had a phone in it. There were little wooden trays on the back of the front seats that you could pull down—you know, to play solitaire and build wooden airplanes and boxes out of Popsicle sticks. And there was a TV. This was in the mid-1960s to late ’60s, so neither the phone nor the TV actually worked, but still . . . no one else had them, and that’s really what counted.
He was among the victims of a famous fixed card game—I think George Burns was another—at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. Apparently during this game there were people hidden in the ceiling looking down at the cards. He lost three million dollars in this card game, so if you’ve ever wondered what kind of person stays in a card game after losing a million dollars, let alone more than two million dollars, now you know.
He watched a lot of television. So much so that at some point he had a second set put in the bedroom. After that we used to say, “Harry’s upstairs watching TVs.”
Over the television in his den there was a picture of him and my mother standing on either side of Richard Nixon taken at some fund-raiser a few years prior. Todd and I were not big Nixon fans, and we took endless childhood joy in taking that picture down and hiding it under the sofa. This was a game that, unlike Nixon himself, never got old.
After a hard day at the golf course (drinking more than golfing), Harry liked to plop himself down in his chair in the den and read the newspaper. Behind it, he’d be picking his nose, which we couldn’t see, but then we would see him doing that thing with his fingers to . . . please, don’t make me say it.
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