Michael Jackson's death - 04

And yet, as Tyrangiel also pointed out, Jackson's memory is complicated, compromised, tainted. In some ways his decline was familiar: the star attraction whose star fades. Once the richest of pop idols, he flirted with bankruptcy in the past decade, selling many of his assets to Sony to wipe out huge debts. For years his main income came not from his own music but from royalties from much of the Beatles' catalog, which he owned. (He may have relinquished some of these rights in a financing deal with Sony; details were not made public.) Jackson was also forced to sell his Neverland ranch outside Santa Barbara, Calif., and auction off many of its treasures. Some antics, like dangling his infant son Prince from a balcony, tested the limits of what an eccentric celebrity could get away with.
Other aspects of Jackson's fall come close to being unique. For the past two decades, he has been famous for being infamous: the sad, self-mutilating creature who may have acted on impulses he thought were paternal but were in fact predatory. Accused twice of child molestation — the first time, in 1994, he escaped trial by paying his accuser $22 million; he was acquitted in 2005 of a second charge — Jackson acknowledged the evidence was damning enough even to a public that demands little but that their stars offer a semblance of recognizable humanity.

Soon after his career went stratospheric, Jackson went extraterrestrial. With the aid of plastic surgeons who should have known better, he almost literally defaced himself. For some imaginary Madame Tussaud's, he transformed himself into his own waxed figure, a modern Phantom of the Opera in pallor and disfigurement. A pop star has problems when his fans can't bear to look at him.