The Cuffed One

By RICHARD CORLISS

To judge from the media coverage--the instant prime-time TV specials; the nonstop frenzy on CNN and in the newspapers; the rapid, rabid airing of the most lurid speculation--you would think Michael Jackson's arrest on charges of molesting a 12-year-old boy was the surprise ending of a story rather than the next and perhaps last act in a tale that threatens to carry with it a tragic inevitability.

Jackson faced similar allegations 10 years ago--the criminal case was dismissed when the accuser refused to testify after settling a civil suit in which the family was reportedly paid $20 million--and rumors of infantile predation have hounded him since. The first time a star makes horrific headlines, the reaction is shock. The second time, it may be chagrin. The third time, it should be just a sigh.

On Wednesday, Santa Barbara County district attorney Thomas Sneddon Jr. announced with unsuppressed glee that he had issued a warrant for Jackson's arrest, apostrophizing, "Get over here and get checked in." The next day Jackson flew in from Las Vegas on his private jet and was put in manacles. The Gloved One had become the Cuffed One. Freed on a $3 million bond, he faces formal charges, perhaps next week, and an arraignment Jan. 9.

Sneddon, 63, who had prosecuted the 1993 case and was none too pleased by its settlement, has been dogged in trying to nab the star. On his HIStory album, Jackson responded to what he considered Sneddon's persecution tactics with the song DS, about a district attorney named Dom Sheldon: "He'll stop at nothing just to get his political say ... You think he brother with the K.K.K.?" When asked if he was trying to sabotage the singer's new CD, Sneddon snarked, "As if I'm into that kind of music."

The district attorney has a better chance of nailing Jackson this time because he's thought by some legal analysts to be ready to bring other children to claim abuse and because the 12-year-old at the center of the case is, according to Sneddon, prepared to testify. A law enacted in the wake of the furor over the 1993 settlement makes it more difficult for an alleged perpetrator to pay off his victim in exchange for squelching his testimony. That should keep Jackson from offering money to his accuser and sandbagging the case.

According to reports, the 12-year-old, a cancer survivor, had spent time at Neverland, Jackson's ranch in Santa Ynez, after hooking up with the star through a foundation that grants wishes to ailing kids (which suggests that either the boy or the foundation hadn't been reading the right tabloids).

The events after that are in dispute. The syndicated news show Extra reported two scenarios, both of which make for titillating TV-movie fodder. The Jackson version: that he showered the family with love and money and the mother went to the authorities only when he stopped sending her checks. The accuser's side: that Jackson had not only abused the boy but had also kept the family imprisoned at Neverland--had effectively kidnapped them.

To some residents of Santa Ynez country, Jackson is the ogre in the castle. To others, he is a genial host they would, and do, entrust with their children. Paul Griffith is an engineer who was invited with his two sons, ages 12 and 15, and a few neighbors to spend the evening at Neverland. Jackson greeted the group of three adults and seven kids, made an effort to learn everyone's name and rode with the kids on his amusement park's bumper cars (Griffith's younger son traveled in the same car as Jackson). Then came a movie, the video arcade and free eats everywhere. Griffith describes Jackson as "a sensitive, caring and exceptionally kind individual with a huge heart who would not seem capable of bringing harm upon anyone, let alone a child." The following day, Griffith let his 12-year-old return to Neverland on his own. The boy did not stay overnight.

Jackson has long identified with Peter Pan (Neverland is the realm of that eternal youth) and seen the children he brings to the ranch as Peter's Lost Boys. But is he living in a different storybook from the one he imagines? Jackson's Neverland could also be Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where careless lads were transformed into slaves and donkeys. And this pop-star Pan could instead be the Pied Piper, the musician who lured children into a mountain as their parents gasped in fright.

Certainly his isolation from the norms of human behavior expresses, in extreme form, the delusion of many movie and music stars whose luster fades as their ego bloats. They seal themselves off from the fans who made them famous, from the street life that nourished their early genius, from anyone who might rein in a celebrity's gaudy impulse. In some remote retreat, they play with their toys and nurse their grandest or grossest fantasies.

Michael Jackson's grand illusion is that he is still Michael Jackson--the Billie Jean, Beat It, Thriller Michael Jackson, the dazzling dancer-singer who in the mid-'80s made record-breaking albums. Since then his finances have somersaulted; the onetime zillionaire has had to borrow heavily against his assets. On the pop scene, he is not a shaping presence but the merest memory; three of his past four albums have involved the repackaging of old material. On Number Ones, the only new song, One More Chance, which was written for him by R. Kelly (himself facing child-pornography charges), has languished in the mid-40s on Billboard's R.-and-B. singles chart. It's conceivable that Jackson earns more money from the Beatles' song catalog, of which he owns half, than from his. And with the aid of plastic surgeons who should have known better, he has almost literally defaced himself. A pop star has problems when his fans can't bear to look at him.

Self-absorbed as Jackson might be, he may not have noticed that the world's opinion of him has diminished and soured. The mass audience is interested in him only when he exposes his weirdness on TV. His visit with Oprah Winfrey in 1993 was the highest-rated show in a decade, not including the Super Bowl, and ABC's airing of a British special on Jackson this February gave the network its biggest Thursday-night viewership in more than a decade. But these are sideshow exhibitions of a crippled creature like John Merrick, the Elephant Man--a figure Jackson has said he identifies with.

Jackson makes headlines with (to use the kindest phrase) unusual antics, like displaying his 8-month-old son outside an upper-floor window. Now he is accused, in effect, of dangling a 12-year-old's innocence over the ledge of his own confused sexual need. Many people think of Jackson as a pathetic predator. Many more don't think of him at all except as the albino freak who used to be Michael Jackson.

Perhaps Jackson is the last innocent in a cynical age. He may not be guilty of the current charges--we are obliged to assume so unless a jury decides otherwise--but it is hard not to think of him as a study in pathology. When he acknowledged to Winfrey that he had been abused as a child, he turned to the camera and said to his father, "I'm sorry. Please don't be mad at me." Jackson is still, everyone agrees, the world's oldest child star. If he could forgive and love the father who abused him, could he not forgive himself for bonding with the children who came into his Neverland bed? Could this lost boy even understand the difference between hugging and fondling, affection and assault, generosity and lechery?

Fans, not just children, have to ask one more question: Why must our stars fall so spectacularly and fail us so egregiously? The suspicion here is, Because we want them to. Indeed, it may be the prime instructive function of celebrities to show us, in their early radiance, what we could dream of being--and in the murk of their decline, what we fear, or know, we could become. --With reporting by Desa Philadelphia and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Jill Underwood/San Diego

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Jill Underwood/San Diego