Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on Separate Vanity Fair Covers for September Issue

Fallen King

I'm really interested in reading both of these articles and will assuredly buy both issues. Will you? I'd love to hear your views. Here are excerpts from both issues:

via The Huffington Post and Vanity Fair Magazine:

"Before his onstage crotch grabbing, his plastic surgeries, his rumored addictions, and, at the lowest point, his child-molestation accusations, Michael Jackson was known for his talent, not his troubles. And for years, Vanity Fair’s Lisa Robinson followed his career, getting to know a singer she describes as “one of the most talented, adorable, enthusiastic, sweet, ebullient performers I’d ever interviewed.”

In her article “The Boy Who Would Be King,” one of two cover stories in the September 2009 issue (to read about the other one, on Farrah Fawcett, click here), Robinson recounts numerous interviews with Jackson, beginning with their first meeting at his family’s home in Encino, California, in 1972, when Michael was 14.

L.R.: So what do you like to do in your spare time?
M.J.: Swim … play pool … We don’t go much out of the gate because we have [everything] here. When we lived in the other house, we would go to the park to play basketball, but now we have it here.

(Michael asks me more questions than I ask him; there are discussions about my maroon nail polish, buying antiques on Portobello Road, the Apollo Theater, Madison Square Garden.)

L.R.: Do you ever get scared onstage?
M.J.: No. If you know what you’re doing, you’re not scared onstage.

In the ensuing years, Jackson would take control of his career to a degree readers may find surprising. Even more surprising, perhaps, was his declaration in 1984 that the original mix of Thriller, his hit 1982 album, had “sounded like crap.”

L.R.: What?
M.J.: Oh, it was terrible. And I cried at the listening party. I said, “I’m sorry—we can’t release this.” I called a meeting with Quincy [Jones], and everybody at the [record] company was screaming that we had to have it out and there was a deadline, and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m not releasing it.” I said, “It’s terrible.” So we re-did a mix a day. Like a mix a day. And we rested two days, then we did a mixing. We were overworked, but it all came out O.K." Yeah. You could say "Thriller" came "out O.K." Wow.

Fallen Angel

"For “Beautiful People, Ugly Choices”—one of two cover stories in Vanity Fair’s September 2009 issue (to preview the Michael Jackson cover story, click here)—Bennetts also spoke to dozens of Fawcett’s associates and intimates, from actor George Hamilton and agent Sue Mengers to Fawcett’s best friend, Alana Stewart, and O’Neal’s children Tatum and Griffin. The result is a definitive portrait of Fawcett’s meteoric rise, turbulent second act, and tragic final chapter.

The truth was that Fawcett had always been more complicated than the clichés, the realities of her life far darker than the sunny image she projected. The gap between her public image and private reality was wide: “I’m always more comfortable when I have on hardly any make-up, my hair is brown and I’m very unattractive,” she said.

The work that brought her solace in later years was a love of art that had nothing to do with fame, a private passion that inspired her to sculpt female nudes with an obsessiveness that seemed like an attempt to understand the world’s fascination with her own body. The documentary [Farrah’s World] that became her last appearance violated every rule of Hollywood image-making; no other star had ever exposed herself to a viewing audience while moaning in pain, vomiting, and losing her famous hair to chemotherapy. But Fawcett’s final triumph was to integrate the public and the private at long last, imbuing her death with a larger meaning and finding redemption in baring her head along with her soul.

"While it’s clear that O’Neal is no angel, he’s at least willing to cop to his own flaws. At one point, he describes himself as “a hopeless father” and offers as evidence this anecdote from Fawcett’s funeral:"

"I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me," Ryan told me. "I said to her, 'You have a drink on you? You have a car?' She said, 'Daddy, it's me--Tatum!' I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it's my daughter. It's so sick."

"That's our relationship in a nutshell," Tatum said when I asked her about it. "You make of it what you will." She sighed. "It had been a few years since we'd seen each other, and he was always a ladies' man, a bon vivant."

I'm so happy I haven't eaten yet today. I did dry-heave a couple of times just picturing that event in my head, FYI, so now you have everything in your head, don't you? My job is done.