This new explosive biography of pop star Michael Jackson is conclusive proof (as if more were needed) that celebrities are different from you and me, and not just because they have more money. Thanks to a Fort Knox bank account, "Wacko Jacko," as the British tabloids love to call him, was able to indulge his weirdest desires—from acquiring a new face to keeping a chimpanzee as a companion to cavorting with young boys, including Macaulay Culkin and Sean Lennon, in his own private amusement park. For years Jackson's behavior was dismissed as simply the quirkiness of a creative genius who, deprived of a childhood himself, was trying to experience childlike joy as an adult.
But as author Christopher Andersen, who also wrote tell-alls on Madonna, Mick Jagger and Jane Fonda, carefully documents, much of Jackson's bizarre persona was purposefully cultivated. The pop star believed that the stranger and more remote he seemed, à la Garbo, the more albums he would sell. Thus Jackson took to wearing a single sequined glove and surgical masks; he went to London in an attempt to buy the skeleton of the Elephant Man; he bought a hyperbaric chamber and then planted the story that he intended to sleep in it (which he later vehemently denied). But the campaign backfired badly in August 1993 when Jackson was accused of child molestation by a California teen. Although the case never went to court, it wreaked personal and professional havoc on Jackson, a setback that will likely require more than his merger-marriage to Lisa Marie Presley to reverse.
While Andersen acknowledges that Jackson's early life—particularly the mental and physical abuse doled out by his father—contributed to his sexual problems and general oddness, he refuses to excuse Jackon's behavior. Instead, Andersen presents Jackson in all his gruesome glory: buying off the parents of young boys with whom he then shares a bed, going back for repeat rhinoplasties until his nose tissue is in ruins, and using various women—most notably Brooke Shields—as his beard at public events. Jackson's distaste for and fear of the opposite sex is evident throughout the book. The feelings were sometimes mutual. When Madonna hears that Jackson refers to her as a heifer behind her back, she says, "I'd rather look like a cow than a space-alien drag queen."
Ultimately, Michael Jackson Unauthorized is a sad book. Jackson's musical achievements and skills as a performer and a businessman are not in doubt. But the reader is left with the image of a selfish, publicity-obsessed star who had the hubris to believe that he played such a big role on the world stage that his contemptible offstage behavior was no one's business but his own. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
by Bebe Moore Campbell
Esther Jackson, the black regional operations manager at Angel City Bank, is confused, conflicted and contrary. She knows what she wants but not how to get it. She wants to become a loan officer but can't find a mentor among the white men (and one woman) already in that department. She wants a man, but her mercenary motto, "no romance without finance," complicates her search. Most of all, though, Esther wants to believe that neither the racial prejudice nor the class differences she encounters at the bank—and society at large—will prevent her from achieving her goals.
But by choosing to set this ambitious, uneven novel in Los Angeles during the months following the 1992 riots, Campbell, author of the 1992 novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine and a regular guest on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, makes the story even more complex. An ambitious professional, Esther puts faith in her credentials but is seldom respected by her white peers. Enter Mallory, the white female loan officer. She's ditzy, has man troubles and is belittled enough by the bank's male loan officers to need a friend. She turns to Esther. On their tentative relationship—the conflict between ingrained prejudice and newfound trust—the author tries to build her novel.
The result is a tale long on issues and short on action. Multiple plotlines about the bank's response to social pressures, a wan embezzlement scheme and Esther's staid romantic adventures fill hundreds of pages while adding up to not much. In the end, Campbell grapples courageously with an America ambivalent about race but gives us neither people we can admire nor ideals we can emulate. (Putnam, $22.95)
by Lorrie Moore
Berie Carr is on a trip to Paris with her husband, Daniel, who likes to talk to strangers, substitutes Spanish for French and thinks brains are a kind of seafood. Adrift in the foreign-ness of the city—and the barrenness of her marriage—Berie flashes back to the summer of '72, when she was 15 and her life was "invaded by" her wild, beautiful best girlfriend, Sils. "In this neck of the woods," says Berie of Horsehearts, a small tourist town near the U.S.-Quebec border, "she was the neck of the woods."
The girls have jobs at Storyland, a nursery-rhyme theme park where Berie is a cashier and Sils is Cinderella. They sneak smokes in Memory Lane, climb out their bedroom windows late at night to drink in bars and hitch rides home with strange men. Smart, flatchested Berie, magnificent boy-magnet Sils: Their relationship is innocent, reckless, totally self-absorbed. When Sils gets pregnant, Berie takes charge and makes choices that doom their friendship by summer's end.
In exquisite prose, Lorrie Moore (Self-Help, Anagrams) evokes time, place and a range of emotions. This funny, poignant novel is as delicious as the French pastry Berie devours. Like the exuberance of youth, it ends too soon. (Knopf, $20)
by Mel Tormé
Ignore the title. This chatty tour isn't a textbook. Instead, the Velvet Fog offers vignettes about folks who redefined American pop singing, names like Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Ethel Waters and Nat "King" Cole dot the 22 chapter headings. The book's engaging first half focuses on individuals, with each chapter serving up a bit of bio and insight into how a vocalist affected American music and Tormé himself. Often Tormé provides personal touches—like how he first heard Bessie Smith at age 5, with his father and two uncles in a Chicago movie palace, or how he tried but couldn't get friendly with Astaire (too private and insecure). And sometimes he pitches significant detail—explaining his focus on lyrics rather than melody, for instance, or why he simplified his scatting. At other times he just makes glancing tributes to the influence of a legend like Smith or Waters. Unfortunately the book's second half sags with unwieldy chapters like Band Leaders Who Sing. But the real virtue of My Singing Teachers comes with its takes on the underrated, like Lee Wiley, or the half-Greek, half-Lebanese, Mozambique-born Al Bowlly. When Tormé and pal Hugh Hefner have their Monday-night get-togethers at Hef's California mansion, it's Bowlly they listen to. (Oxford University Press, $19.95)
by Roy Blount Jr.
It would be hard to work up much enthusiasm for a book of midwestern humor or one of northern humor. But speak the words "book of southern humor," and you'll have folks everywhere nodding their noggins and saying, "About time." What's the reason for the South's comic superiority? According to author and talk show personality Roy Blount Jr., "Being humorous in the South is like being motorized in Los Angeles or argumentative in New York.... It's just something that you're in trouble [for] if you aren't."
So then, Southerners are funny by nature—or at least by peer pressure. Well, this is a book that gives ample testimony to that notion. Blount has anthologized some 150 pieces of southern writing—including song lyrics, essays, letters, short stories and novel excerpts—from authors as diverse as Alice Walker, Lyle Lovett, Flannery O'Connor and Davy Crockett (yes, that Davy Crockett).
Some of the best selections are from people you wouldn't expect to find in such a tome. There's a rollicking piece by trumpet great Louis Armstrong about barhopping in New Orleans with his Mama when he was a high-spirited 17-year-old with a taste for demon rum. And there's screenwriter Nunnally Johnson's letter from Hollywood detailing a young Zsa Zsa Gabor's Christmas Day indiscretion, which is made riotous by the surprise arrival of her husband and his four private detectives. This is a great book to have by the bedside (or, if you prefer, in the outhouse) for handy reference. You'll find yourself turning to it whenever you need a shot of the spunk that comes from laughing at the magnificent ways people find to muddle through their lives. (Norton, $27)
- Contributors:
- Clare McHugh,
- V.R. Peterson,
- Louisa Ermelino,
- Gene Santoro,
- Mark Bautz.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
