A famous person's impulse to withdraw may reflect either arrogance or humility. It may be a misanthropic turning of one's back or a desperate attempt to shield one's vulnerability, as seemed to happen with Judy Garland before her death at age 47.
Whatever was Jackson's motive, his decision echoed in his songs. Earlier in his career, the theme from "Ben" (a movie about a boy whose closest friend is a rat) was superficially sweet but left a cloying, queasy aftertaste. At the height of Jackson's fame and influence, "Thriller" (the John Landis video more than the song) playfully hinted at a frightening alter ego lurking inside the handsome, charismatic performer.
A couple of years later, with "Bad," Jackson's push-pull relationship toward his growing celebrity versus his desire for privacy made him ditch the tuxedo-clad dreamboat image he affected in "Off the Wall" and the seductive cover shot of "Thriller." For "Bad" he wore a black biker jacket and something closer to a scowl than a smile while warning others to keep their distance in the late '80s hit tune "Leave Me Alone."
It was quite a change from the adorable little boy with an Afro and funky clothes pleading "I Want You Back," or "Human Nature's" lovely, gauzy yearning for contact with a warm female presence and a giant city beyond the bedroom walls.
Jackson himself never made any secret of why he felt the need to retreat into a labyrinth of solitude. His Rosebud, of course, was exactly the same as Charles Foster Kane's. It was the childhood that had been stolen from him. "I never had the chance to do the fun things kids do," Jackson once said. "There was no Christmas, no holiday celebrating. So now you try to compensate for some of that loss."
By far the most troubling aspect of Jackson's withdrawal was the issue of whether he ever abused any of the children he invited to visit his fantasy world. Fans and cultural historians will be debating for years to come whether Jackson's self-exile was more a case of pathos or pathology, a misunderstood man's involuntary retreat into his own psyche, or a predator's escape into a safe house.
For a great artist, which Jackson unquestionably was, cultivating a rich creative life doesn't have to mean dropping out of the human race. Thoreau, in actuality, was no recluse. He received visitors regularly at Walden and remained vitally engaged with the community around him and with the issues of the day. He maintained his hermetic equilibrium by keeping the emotional and physical clutter around him to a minimum.
Jackson's solitude was more like Kane's, surrounded by gilded objects and haunted by the specter of irrelevance. One of Jackson's great achievements was to prove that a black man could attain the accouterments of the American dream in extremis -- money, mansions, global adulation -- armed with little more than his own prodigious talent. His greatest personal tragedy was to discover how poorly those trophies compensate for whatever else may be missing in a human life.
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reed.johnson@latimes.com
