DAYTON, Ohio — My 13-year-old daughter Veronica — hardly a news junkie like her mama — sat transfixed by the news of Michael Jackson's death, watching CNN well past midnight.
Not that she was a Michael Jackson fan, by any stretch. "I thought of him as this creep," she confessed. So did all her friends: "We'd talk about him sometimes, people my age only knew him as this weird guy who used to be black and used to be a good musician."
For her generation, there is little trace of the "Thriller" in Jackson. More House of Horrors.
Why the fascination, then?
After a little probing, I got to the bottom of it. "He was so famous he didn't seem real somehow," Veronica explained. "It's like a person in a book."
I had a flashback to Aug. 16, 1977, when a TV bulletin broke in with news of Elvis Presley's death. My sister and I leapt from the couch as if struck by a single lightning bolt.
How could Elvis die?
It's not that we were fans; that would come later, when we could move beyond the Vegas Elvis and B-movie Elvis of our youth to discover the King of the Sun Records era. Back then he seemed more icon than individual; more product than flesh-and-blood human being. It was almost like learning that Betty Crocker had died, or the Frisch's Big Boy.
This wasn't a rational reaction, of course; it was my first real eye-opener to the way we de-humanize American celebrities. Michael Jackson was only a teenager then, not much older than the little boy who first captivated us with the Jackson 5 and not many years away from becoming the world's biggest superstar.
Nobody could have predicted a future that may be the ultimate example of truth being stranger than fiction: The King of Pop grows up to marry — however briefly — The King's daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. Now Michael's death reminds me of Elvis' in that it is shocking, but somehow hardly surprising. In their later years a sense of tragedy clung to both stars like one of Jay Gatsby's suits.
The allegations of child abuse made Jackson's decline much more disturbing than Presley's. The charges and the persistent rumors couldn't help but diminish our sympathy for his notoriously lousy upbringing. The kid who was robbed of his own childhood now stood charged with robbing other children of theirs. Jackson was acquitted, of course, but he was Presumed Guilty in the court of public opinion. "All I ever heard about was his hanging out with 13-year-olds," Veronica said.
She was shocked by the footage of his electrifying performances and by the photos of the handsome young black man before he embarked on a self-mutilating series of plastic surgeries. "Why did he change?" she asked.
What will endure, I wonder: the scintillating pop music or the twisted life story?
Probably both. Jackson will remain the quintessential cautionary tale about child stars.
It's not a pretty story. But it's one we should remember the next time someone tries to turn a child into a business empire first, and a human being second.
Mary McCarty writes for the Dayton Daily News. E-mail: mmccarty(at)DaytonDailyNews.com.