America's Peter Pan of Pop

I remember reading years ago that Lisa Marie said that, in private, Michael Jackson spoke in a perfectly normal (well…) male voice. By the magic of Google, I found the piece and present it to you. Tina Brown, Washington Post, March 2005. Ms. Brown has a very sharp and unsparing take on America’s Peter Pan of Pop. And in the Rolling Stone interview to which Ms. Brown refers, Lisa Marie is even more devastating about the man behind the man-boy mask:

Read Brown’s Article Here.

An interview with Jackson’s ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley by Chris Heath in Rolling Stone in April 2003 would support the “secretly sane” theory. “I was always saying [to Jackson] people wouldn’t think I was so crazy if they saw who the hell you really are,” Presley told Heath. “That you sit around, and you drink and you curse and you’re [expletive] funny and you have a bad mouth, and you don’t have that high voice all the time. I don’t know why you think that works for you, because it doesn’t anymore.”

Ms. Presley, to be sure, has a reason to portray Jackson as less bizarre than people assume. Marrying someone most people regard as an extraterrestrial freak didn’t do a whole lot for her image. (“Ok. Hello,” she expounds. “I was delusionary. I got some romantic idea in my head that I could save him and save the world.”) But it might add some genuine dramatic tension if Jackson turned out to be pop music’s version of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the Mafia boss who fooled the justice system for years by shuffling around the streets of Greenwich Village mumbling to himself in his bedroom slippers and bathrobe. If this were true, of course, it would also mean Jackson is just a plain old garden-variety ped, albeit one who instead of hanging around public playgrounds built his own at Neverland.

Amy Holmes, a frequent guest on CNN and HBO’s Real Time, was a speechwriter for former Majority Leader Bill Frist.