DEATH OF MICHAEL JACKSON:Around the boat, there were candles and placards from devotees. One left by Bryan read: "You had a huge influence on my life. One day, years ago, I had the chance to meet you. I simply shook your hand and said: 'Thank you for entertaining me'." Another said: "Thanx 4 your love."
THERE WAS a small plastic sailing boat lying on the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard yesterday. In it, a little plastic boy was sitting dressed in turquoise with a pointed hat. A note attached to the boat read: “Michael, here’s Peter Pan to take you to Neverland.”
The toy was at the centre of an impromptu memorial that had formed overnight at the spot of Michael Jackson’s celebrity star on the Hollywood walk of fame.
It was encircled by an extraordinary scrum that managed to combine quiet public devotion with the media frenzy busily feeding off it. A fitting tribute to Jackson’s life, perhaps, which also managed to combine both elements in gargantuan proportions.
A third read: “As simple as doe rae me, with love from all of Chicago.” There were teddy bears and framed photographs and flowers that were already wilting early on the morning after his death.
But the element that stood out was the cameras that circled Jackson’s star in death as they so often had in life. Any genuine fan had to fall in line behind the walled bank of TV tripods, their mourning secondary to the need to transmit an emotional televisual tribute.
Those fans had started to assemble before dawn. On the night of his death, the walk of fame star had been drowned under scaffolding for the premier of Bruno. Several fans had mistakenly gathered beside the star of a radio personality who shared Jackson’s name. Yesterday though the crowd got it right. They formed into a tight knot outside the Hollywood tourist destination Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
Some fans were standing on top of the adjacent star to Jackson’s – that for Mickey Mouse – unaware of the affinity which Jackson surely would have appreciated.
Among the crowd was Latonya Holsome (45). She wore a white glove embroidered with gold thread, in the style of Jackson's military uniforms, holding it aloft for the TV cameras. In it, she held a battered vinyl copy of Forever Michael Jacksonsigned by the singer.
As a black woman growing up in San Francisco, she said, Jackson opened up doors in her mind. “For all of us black folks, he showed us that there was a way, that we didn’t have to hold back.”
When she gave up drugs in 1989, it was inspired by Man in the Mirror: "I'm gonna make a change/Once in my life."
Asked what she thought of the multiple controversies that stalked Jackson – not least his 2005 trial in which he was acquitted for child sex abuse – she had no doubt where those accusations came from.
“They were trying to break him down,” she said. “He’s an African-American, of a stature like Gandhi or the pope. When he has all this power, why wouldn’t they want to tear him down?”
Others had similar reasons for discounting the allegations that dogged Jackson for so many years. “I never believed those reports from the start,” said Patricia Clark. “They never swayed my decision to love him, not at all.”
She grew up in St Louis, Missouri, and saw the Jackson 5 perform in the town. She later returned to see him perform Thriller, a "mesmerising" experience.
On Thursday evening, as soon as she heard the news, she dashed to the Los Angeles hospital where Jackson had been taken. From there, she moved to his home in the hills of Los Angeles and, by 6am yesterday, she was back mingling with the throng on the walk of fame. “I couldn’t believe that it had happened. I still can’t,” she said.
There was undoubtedly a tacky side to Jackson, expressed in all that garish pantomime clothing and plastic surgery. That too was visible on Hollywood Boulevard, a shrine to great entertainers that exists amid a sea of tack.
Over the road from his star is Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium. It has a model of a T-Rex rising from its roof.
However none of the fans was thinking about that, either. They preferred to remember those sublime early songs in which Jackson towered over his taller brothers through the sheer force of his pure voice. Or his equally sublime dancing in the 1980s where each limb, each joint, appeared to be able to move independently of the next, yet in perfect rhythm.
Art Rodriquez, an aspiring artist from Texas wearing shades and a black felt hat, thought hard, then gave his best shot at summing up Michael Jackson's life: "He sacrificed his entire life to entertain us. We owe him respect." – ( Guardian service)