Of all the myths enshrouding Michael Jackson's too-brief life, none was more potent than his image as the isolated artist, the tormented creative soul cut off from ordinary mortals.
It's an archetype with a strongly American pedigree, as grizzled and hoary as Citizen Kane clutching his snow globe while he sits alone in Xanadu, brooding on happier days.
Thoreau took to his cabin in the woods. Howard Hughes hid out buck-naked in germ-free hotels. Elvis holed up in Graceland under the sway of drugs and a byzantine retinue of friends and false comforters. J.D. Salinger squats behind his New England stockade, emerging every few years to threaten some or other writer with a lawsuit.
And let's not forget Gatsby, vanishing into the mob scene at his own lavish parties, or Norma Desmond, sustained by her delusional grandeur as she rots away in her Sunset Boulevard mansion with her stuffed pet chimp. (What is it about celebrity seclusion and simian fellowship?)
But few have inhabited the role of the reclusive eccentric more fully than Jackson, who at the time of his death, although decades past his prime, was still big -- at least to himself and the millions of us who came of age grooving and lip-syncing to his songs. It's pop music that got small.
Close friends described Jackson as the loneliest person they ever knew, entombed in his own celebrity, prematurely embalmed in his own legend. The King of Pop, who favored faux-military outfits, complete with braids and epaulets, lived out his adulthood as the sovereign ruler of his own private realm, Neverland, where normal codes of behavior didn't apply and the laws and taboos of the outside world didn't necessarily obtain.
The most painfully self-conscious of superstars, Jackson skillfully cultivated his own aura of apartness. In his later years during public appearances he was surrounded by bodyguards, his face sometimes obscured by a surgical mask or shaded under an umbrella, like a figure in a Magritte painting, as if he might wilt in the mega-watt glare of the omnipresent paparazzi.
"In a crowd, I'm afraid," he said. "Onstage, I feel safe."
His willful isolation turned him into an obscure object of desire, a human tchotchke, apparently so delicate that it might break if mishandled. Contemporary sculptor Jeff Koons recognized the fact in his 1988 work "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," in which he rendered the singer and his primate playmate in ceramic, as if they were a Dresden shepherd and shepherdess. "Look," Jackson's persona told his adoring masses, "but don't touch."
