| Last week's documentary about Michael Jackson astonished the world. But Jonathan Margolis, the British writer who knows him well, says Jackson is as good a parent as anyone - and better than most
By Jonathan Margolis
This is, perhaps, not the best week for declaring that Michael Jackson is rather a good father. But I do so now on the basis of more than Martin Bashir's television documentary.
I spent several months working with Michael and his guru and friend, the former Oxford University rabbi Shmuley Boteach, on a still-unfinished book about, interestingly, the importance of adults retaining their childlike qualities.
I got to like Michael and his children a lot. He is sweet, charming, intelligent, thinking, and highly eccentric. He is also deeply sad - not in the contemporary sense of being inadequate - but sad as in melancholic, unhappy and damaged. He is, in my judgment, a good man.
His older children, Prince and Paris, whom I spent a considerable time with, are bright, well mannered, unspoilt and unaffected.
Apart from knowing the unconventional Jacksons a little bit, I am now in my forties and a father of more than average experience for my age. I have co-raised three children, the youngest now a teenager, and have hardline, bordering on over-protective, views on parenting.
I get upset at seeing shaven-headed little kids been thumped in Sainsbury's and even angrier at casual middle-class child cruelty. I shout 'child abuser' at smug parents on bicycles who show off their green credentials by towing little Archie through traffic at exhaust-pipe height in those baby trailers.
Although it was in the best traditions of compelling, car crash TV and will win shedloads of awards, the synthetic empathy and tendentious self-aggrandisement of Bash Ears (as George Best, another victim, amusingly calls this clumsy, fake Louis Theroux) were too much for me.
The film did show the Michael I know: naive, simplistic, autocratic and with disastrous taste in furnishings. I am sure, however, that he is not a child molester, inadvisable sleepovers or not.
He has studied childcare with dedication. He is committed to thoughtful, non-violent parenting. He handles Prince and Paris with a skill and patience that puts mine to shame. And, no, they never wore masks when I was with them. Nobody I know thinks ill of Michael's parenting abilities either, even post-Bashir.
Aware that I am acquainted with him, a variety of people rang me last week to say how angry they were. Have we become so cynical and paranoid, one professional man demanded, that it is impossible to love kids quite asexually without provoking suspicion? 'For Christ's sake,' he ranted, 'when I was small I had books about Noddy and Big Ears sleeping in the same bed, and nobody thought anything of it.'
I have also earwigged conversations on buses and trains. Certainly, there is s******ing and bafflement over Michael's transparent fibbing about plastic surgery but the consensus is that he seems really nice, if a bit loopy.
The sleepovers aside, which sound a bad - but not intrinsically evil - idea we all know where the other grounds lie for concern about Michael's parenting.
First, the masks. I spent several weeks around Michael without once seeing his trademark surgical mask. One evening in London, when he came to Britain for his Oxford Union speech (which I helped him with a little) we were going out. The hotel was surrounded by fans. As we left his suite, Michael whipped out a black silk face mask. I looked quizzically at it and shrugged as if to ask 'What's that all about'? He winked, lifted the corner of the mask and whispered: 'Razzle-dazzle 'em.'
And that, I think, is the explanation for the masks and those weird burkas he has been putting on the kids for public occasions. For Michael - he of the tawdry Grecian urns at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop - this is glamour, mystique, showbiz razzle-dazzle. Think Thriller, the video. He is teaching his children, whose privacy is invaded more than that of any British royal brat, to get used to it.
The same goes for the birth story, which even Michael's supporters found a little icky. For those who missed it: Michael told how he rushed Paris, his daughter, home from hospital so precipitately that she was still bloody from the birth, if not attached to her mother.
Again, the problem is that owing to his own odd upbringing, he thinks such a thing is glamorous and exciting. Then again, if he is so obviously fantasising about the plastic surgery, why do we believe him about the birth? I suspect it didn't quite happen as he describes it.
I take a revisionist view of the time last November that he dangled his new baby, Prince Michael ll, known as Blanket, from his Berlin hotel suite, the most famous balcony incident since Verona.
I suspected then that this was something of nothing, and Bashir's footage proved it. I am amazed that intelligent writers still refer to it as an authentic dangle. The film shows it was no stunt but, at worst, a momentary error.
Michael has an exceptionally athletic build and huge, strong hands. He is very confident in his physical strength. The crowd below was baying to see the baby, and he held him up at an open window, knowing how strong and capable he is. The baby wriggled awkwardly, Michael went 'whoops', and pulled Blanket safely back in before he did the child a mischief.
What we saw, crucially, from the footage filmed from inside the hotel room was that there was no balcony - merely a section of railing to stop guests falling out of the tall window.
Finally, there is the vibrating movement Michael made with his knee while bottle-feeding Blanket. This does worry me, although not as much as the green muslin Michael placed over the nipper's head. I imagine that was because the singer was already becoming deeply untrusting of the creepy Bashir.
What worried me about the outcry over the knee is that I used to make that movement with all my babies to calm them. Most of mine cried when I stopped, and giggled when I started again.
Parents make mistakes, often near-fatal ones, all the time without being investigated by social workers. If Bashir had been in Leeds in 1980, he would have caught me changing the bulb in a table lamp that was still plugged in. The phone went, and while my back was turned my stray baby daughter came within a millimetre of electrocution.
To me, Michael is level-headed. While other celebrities are gullible, for instance, when it comes to such cults as Scientology and Kabbalah, he has seen them off, despite high pressure, celeb-on-celeb salesmanship from both.
He is that strong in his convictions. Love her as he does, for example, he disagrees profoundly with his friend Elizabeth Taylor, the children's godmother, who believes the odd smack is all right.
Michael has his own views on what is weird. He regards it as disgusting that his friend Princess Diana's children were encouraged by their father to witness the gory aftermath of a fox hunt.
I saw Michael's amazing empathy with kids many times. He talks to them as though they are adults. He will not tolerate them interrupting an adult conversation, but is unusually attuned to young voices asking questions or requesting a drink, when most of us choose to pretend slightly deafness.
Abused children inevitably advertise their suffering with introversion, aggression, shyness, sullenness, distrustfulness and depression. But, neurotic, eccentric and downright flaky as their famous father is, I don't see any of the above in Prince and Paris.
Michael's is an eccentric domestic arrangement, but infinitely better, I suggest, than the average experienced by Hollywood kids. Moreover, he chooses exceptionally sensible, middle-aged women as nannies.
Nobody thinks anything of it when celebrity mothers exclude fathers from their children's lives. Liz Hurley has been lionised for doing so.
I would say Michael Jackson has given more thought to parenthood than most of us parents who don't suffer from the sobriquet, Wacko. | |
The reporting and the "source close to the singer"