By JESSE WASHINGTON
AP National Writer | Posted: Tuesday, July 7, 2009 12:00 am
LOS ANGELES - Michael Jackson was eulogized in words and song Tuesday by an all-star list of musicians, athletes and other celebrities during a mournful ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, with the most poignant moment delivered by his sobbing 11-year-old daughter.
"I just want to say ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you can ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much,'' Paris-Michael Jackson said before almost collapsing in the arms of her aunt Janet Jackson.
Watched by millions around the world, the memorial struck a tone more spiritual than spectacular Tuesday, opening with a church choir serenading his golden casket and continuing with somber speeches and gospel-infused musical performances.
The Rev. Lucious W. Smith of the Friendship Baptist Church in Pasadena gave the greeting on the same stage where Jackson had been rehearsing for a concert series in the days before his June 25 death at age 50. Then Mariah Carey sang the opening performance with a sweet rendition of the Jackson 5 ballad "I'll Be There,'' a duet with Trey Lorenz.
"We come together and we remember the time,'' said Smith, riffing on one of Jackson's lyrics. "As long as we remember him, he will always be there to comfort us.''
Millions of fans around the world gathered at odd hours to watch the ceremony, which was broadcast by the major TV networks and cable channels from Tokyo to Paris to New York and streamed everywhere online in one of the biggest celebrity send-offs ever seen.
Among those who saluted Jackson were Motown music mogul Berry Gordy Jr., Brooke Shields, the Rev. Al Sharpton and basketball greats Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant. Jennifer Hudson sang Jackson's hit "Will You Be There'' and John Mayer played guitar on a whisper-light rendition of "Human Nature.''
"This is a moment that I wished I didn't live to see,'' Stevie Wonder said before his performance. Usher broke down in tears after singing "Gone Too Soon.''
Although the event was billed as a celebration, some speakers took the occasion to come to the defense of Jackson, whose life was marked as much by criticism and scorn as scintillating talent.
Gordy said that despite what he called "some sad times and maybe some questionable decisions on his part,'' the title King of Pop wasn't good enough for Jackson. "I think he is simply the greatest entertainer that ever lived,'' Gordy said.
Emotions rose when Sharpton delivered a fiery eulogy highlighting all the barriers Jackson broke and the troubles he faced. "Every time he got knocked down, he got back up,'' Sharpton said, and the applauding crowd jumped to its feet.
Sharpton rode the moment, building to a crescendo. "There wasn't nothing strange about your daddy,'' he said later, addressing Jackson's three children in the front row. "It was strange what your daddy had to deal with!'' After he left the stage, chants of "Mi-chael! Mi-chael!'' filled the arena.
The ceremony wrapped up with group performances of "We Are the World'' and "Heal the World'' sung by Lionel Richie, Hudson and Jackson family members - including his children - before a backdrop of symbols of religions from around the world. They were joined onstage by children in white and several other people who had participated in the ceremony. Then members of Jackson's family took the stage to thank the crowd and share their own thoughts, barely able to hide their emotion as they hugged in the ceremony's final moments.
An estimated 20,000 people were in the Staples Center as Jackson's flower-draped casket was brought to the venue in a motorcade under law enforcement escort. Those who gathered constituted a visual representation of Jackson's life: black, white and everything in between, wearing fedoras and African headdresses, sequins and surgical masks.
Fans with a ticket wore gold wristbands and picked up a metallic gold program guide on their way in. Acting as pallbearers, Jackson's brothers each wore a gold necktie and, in a touch borrowed from their brother, a single spangly white glove and sunglasses.
Brother Jermaine Jackson took the stage and sang the standard "Smile'' as he fought back tears.
Jackson's hearse had been part of a motorcade that smoothly whisked his body 10 miles across closed freeways from a private service at a Hollywood Hills cemetery to his public memorial and awaiting fans.
The traffic snarls and logistical nightmares that had been feared by police and city officials did not materialize. Traffic was actually considered by police to be lighter than normal.
"I think people got the message to stay home,'' said California Highway Patrol Officer Miguel Luevano.
Deputy Police Chief Sergio Diaz, operations chief for the event, said authorities had expected a crowd of 250,000. Besides reporters and those with tickets to the memorial service, the crowd around the Staples Center perimeter numbered only about 1,000, he said.
Outside the Staples Center, Claudia Hernandez, 29, said she loved Jackson's music as a girl growing up in Mexico. Now a day-care teaching assistant in Los Angeles, Hernandez said she cried watching TV coverage of his death.
"I'm trying to hold in my emotions,'' said Hernandez, wearing a wristband to allow her admittance to the service and holding a framed photograph of Jackson. "I know right now he's teaching the angels to dance.''
More than 1.6 million people registered for the lottery for free tickets to Jackson's memorial. A total of 8,750 were chosen to receive two tickets each.
"There are certain people in our popular culture that just capture people's imaginations. And in death, they become even larger,'' President Barack Obama told CBS while in Moscow. "Now, I have to admit that it's also fed by a 24/7 media that is insatiable.''
The city of Los Angeles set up a Web site Tuesday to allow fans to contribute money to help the city pay for his Staples Center memorial service. Mayoral spokesman Matt Szabo estimated the service will cost $1.5 million to $4 million.
It was not clear what will happen to Jackson's body. The Forest Lawn Memorial Park Hollywood Hills cemetery is the final resting place for such stars as Bette Davis, Andy Gibb, Freddie Prinze, Liberace and recently deceased David Carradine and Ed McMahon.
Jermaine Jackson has expressed a desire to have him buried someday at Neverland, his estate in Southern California.
Midway during the memorial service, police Officer April Harding told the media gathered at the gates of Forest Lawn to disperse. Asked if Jackson's body was going to be returned to the cemetery after the memorial, she replied: "His body is not going to be returned here.'' She did not say where it would be taken.
AP Entertainment writer Sandy Cohen, AP Music writer Nekesa Mumbi Moody, AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch, Associated Press writers Solvej Schou, Christina Hoag, Amy Taxin, Andrew Dalton, Anthony McCartney, Danica Kirka, and AP researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
From a celebrity's death, a very American memorial
By TED ANTHONY
AP National Writer
"I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others,'' one of Michael Jackson's closest friends said on Twitter this week. "I cannot be part of the public whoopla.''
But on Tuesday, a very curious day in the republic of epic productions, Elizabeth Taylor - hardly a stranger to living the public life - seemed just about the only one.
He was a celebrity spectacle like no other, so it seemed natural that Michael Jackson's end unfolded the same way. The staging of his final show Tuesday commandeered the heart of the city of fame, turning millions of his fans into lottery players who chased unlikely dreams of front-row goodbyes.
The result: an unparalleled, though strikingly sedate, public memorial that offered, like his jumbled life, a little something for everyone who went looking.
Sharing grief with millions of others - on TV, in mass spectacles and across the gossamer human connection known as the Internet - has become as American as, say, churning out fresh disposable idols on reality TV.
This was eulogy as performance art, public outpouring as premium content - and, not accidentally, funeral as variety show. To call it a last performance is barely metaphorical. The service alone was a guided tour of American show business - a little gospel telethon, a little Grammy ceremony, a little "Soul Train,'' a little "Weekly Top 40,'' even a little "Circus of the Stars.''
The public mourning of prematurely departed celebrities isn't new in America. More than 100,000 people, many of them weeping, turned out in 1926 for the New York funeral of Rudolph Valentino. It has only accelerated in recent decades: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Princess Diana. And of course there was Jackson's former father-in-law and brother in stratospheric fame, Elvis.
But contained communal lament is one thing. What unfolded on Tuesday and in the days leading up to it felt like something else - something magnified beyond even the usual American embrace of the epic.
"In life, he was rejected by so many different groups of people. But, in death, everyone seems to want to claim him,'' said Jennifer James McCollum, 41, of Oklahoma City, who writes about generational issues in her blog, JenX67.
This absurdly talented, weird, tragic man who contained so many of the things that perplex and consume modern America - from race and sex to obsession with appearance and attachment to childhood - seems to have touched most every chord at once.
"There are many Michaels for many souls,'' said CNN contributor Bryan Monroe, who interviewed Jackson at length in 2007 when he was editorial director of Ebony magazine.
There are also, suddenly, many more ways to connect, lament, magnify, share. The emerging mythology - that the communications explosion that followed Jackson's death almost "broke the Internet'' - suggests both the emergence of new communities and the hunger for some kind of mass public square of sentiment.
"People want to be a part of something. And this is something really memorable. Why did everybody go to Woodstock?'' asked Rosemary Hornak, a psychology professor at Meredith College in North Carolina who studies how people remember.
Now they can. No longer, as in Sunday morning services, do you just turn to your pewmate and shake hands. This is the age of the global funeral, the interactive death, with mourners always on hand to prolong the experience - either with a big-time celebrity lament or a simple online guest book for a beloved great-aunt.
"The Internet was originally an exchange of ideas. It's almost as if, with Web 2.0, it's about exchanging emotions,'' said Paul Soper, 25, who works in retail in Columbus, Ohio.
That's not the only change, though. The usual suspects - a 24-hour news cycle, the digitization of music and imagery, the fragmentation of society, the democratization of the arts - helped set the stage for Tuesday's service and its runup.
In fact, some of the precise pathways that Michael Jackson so pivotally carved, such as pioneering the music video and mixing black and white traditions, helped create the cultural place for an event like this.
"It's pop art. But just walking down the street in America today is pop art,'' said John Tebeau, a New York artist who uses cartoon art to interpret popular culture in his paintings.
Beyond the closed roads, the costly security and the funerary hyperbole ("simply the greatest entertainer that ever lived,'' Motown founder Berry Gordy said), one notion seemed to reign. The man who built a reputation as one of the most reclusive entertainers of our era was, to hear almost everyone tell it, a universal and personal inspiration to millions.
"You believed in Michael and he believed in you. He made you believe in yourself,'' Queen Latifah told mourners. And in the context of our continuously refracted society, she nailed it.
In the end, Jackson was indeed the man in the mirror - our mirror. No matter that sometimes it was a fun-house mirror. No matter that, behind the music, we didn't always like the reflection that peered back at us. No matter that, finally, the mirror was cracked beyond any hope of repair. The big goodbye was what mattered, and it was the show of a lifetime.
"Death,'' Jim Morrison once said, "is only going to happen to you once. I don't want to miss it.'' Today his grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is overrun by people wanting to touch a piece of him, even if only a hunk of granite.
It was the same way with Michael Jackson. On Tuesday, people who never actually saw him in real life - those who adored him, those who danced to him, even those who thought he was a freak - amassed to say they just wanted to see him one last time.
And in their expressions, one thing seemed clear: In death, as in life, Michael Jackson remains a product - bought, sold and looked upon, scorned and glorified and admired. And still, forever, coveted.
The endless gaze, the endless desire for more. What's a bigger part of the modern American experience than that?
EDITOR'S NOTE - Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.