Michael Jackson, R.I.P.

For the last half-hour, Michael Jackson has been alive or not, depending on what channel you were watching. He managed to simultaneously be alive on Fox News, in a coma on CNN and dead on MSNBC. At one point on CNN, Wolf Blitzer was saying he was alive but in a coma while the crawl at the bottom of the screen said, "Michael Jackson dead." Eventually, they all got in sync.

There's something oddly appropriate about it. No one was ever too sure what was what with Michael, up to and sometimes even including his gender or race.

I worked with him in the eighties on a proposed Michael Jackson cartoon show for CBS. He didn't want to do it but had been persuaded by associates that he had to okay the project for business reasons. So I found myself in the odd position of trying to come up with something he'd like…and all the time, he was saying, "I'm a rock star…I don't want to be a cartoon character." Eventually, I moonwalked off the project and the cartoon series idea evaporated. Michael got his way.

As long as his albums were making zillions, Michael always got his way. Like Howard Hughes squirreled away like a hermit in a Vegas penthouse, there was always someone to cater to his every whim…and no one to tell him he was crazy. I met with him several times at an estate he had on Hayvenhurst in the Valley, just south of Ventura Boulevard. The way the conversations went, I got the idea that if Michael one day decided he wanted Ventura flooded with chocolate pudding, that would have happened by the time I drove home.

Based on my admittedly-limited contact with the man, I naturally assumed that his later problems were an outgrowth of what I witnessed. When he thought the public would understand that he could sleep with children and that no one would assume anything sexual, there was no one who could tell him, "Uh, Michael, I don't think that will get the reaction you assume." That became my theory but maybe that's not it. Maybe by then, people were telling him that and he refused to believe it…or care how it all went down. When I knew him, he thought it would harm his image to be seen as someone who primarily appealed to kids. Ten years later, he failed to stop the world from thinking he was molesting them.

Others can and will write volumes about his appeal, his electricity on a stage, his musical innovations…and the darker, money-challenged events of his last decade or so. I remember a certain lovable, impishness about the guy that occasionally peeked out between statements of total self-obsession. At one point, he was showing me around the estate and introducing me to his pets, and we had an exchange I will never forget.

I had been hired to create and develop the proposed cartoon show because, among other reasons, Michael had expressed some affection for the Richie Rich cartoon show, which I'd story-edited. On the grounds of his mansion, after showing me his llama and some small amusement park rides, he turned to me and said, "I love Richie Rich."

I said the same thing you'd say to the guy. I said, "Michael, you are Richie Rich."

He had an odd look on his face. There was always, by then, an odd look at his face but this particular one looked like it came from his brain and not from a surgeon. Then he grinned and said, "Thank you." That's the Michael Jackson I'd like to remember. I wish it could have stopped there.