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At the satellite truck next door to ours sits Marti, an ABC anchorwoman and long-term resident of LA. Is the atmosphere tonight so very different, I ask her. She sighs. ‘The skirts are a little shorter and the heels a little higher.’ To mourn Michael Jackson? I struggle to catch her drift. ‘Not for Michael,’ she explains, ‘for the TV cameras. They’re hoping to get talent-spotted by all the crews in town.’ Should I be shocked? It would seem a little hypocritical. If you can’t be shameless about wanting fame in Hollywood, then where can you?
24 hours later
The next day we start broadcasting at midnight to hit BBC Breakfast in the UK. We have decamped to the San Fernando valley and are stationed, with 20 other broadcasters, in a quiet residential cul de sac, home to the Jackson clan. The night is balmy and once again people have come to leave makeshift memorials of balloons, flowers and, indeed, a large purple gorilla. One fan, Eduardo, decides to leave a framed photo of himself for Michael. And someone has left a large box of strawberry Twizzler liquorice sticks which my cameraman is eyeing enviously but cannot quite bring himself to pinch.
It is these tributes — in all their creativity — that, oddly, give our shot here legitimacy and inform the viewer, shorthand, that we are still covering the DEATH OF A SUPERSTAR. Every car that leaves the compound is followed and snapped, but there will be no Cherie-on-election-morning moment, with a tousled prime minister’s wife still in pyjamas opening her front door to the world. The Jacksons know life in the spotlight too well. Indeed, this compound has probably had a photographer by its gates every day of every year that they have lived here.
48 hours later
If the fans last night refused to do anything other than eulogise, then already, tonight, the mood is different. I meet Ray and Debbie from New York. Ray visited this spot many times as a child, hoping to catch a glimpse of his hero. Now he has returned with his wife. I ask if it matters to him — as an African-American — that Michael Jackson wrote a song about the irrelevance of being black or white around the time he went from looking like a black man to a white girl.
‘Yes,’ he says, and his honesty startles me. ‘That’s when we parted ways.’ He has nonetheless come back to say goodbye.
That evening the Black Entertainment Awards host the music industry’s first formal tribute to Jackson. His father, Joe — accused in Michael’s autobiography of ruining his childhood — turns up unexpectedly and then proceeds to flog his own record label between tributes to his son. ‘We just lost the biggest star in the world,’ he declares. Is he sounding like a father or a manager? The American networks tut and think the latter. It’s good to have a villain of some kind again.
72 hours later
They are airing one-hour specials here in Hollywood and slowly the weirdo questions are returning. Did he really want his body to be preserved in polyurethane by Gunther von Hagens? What was he (appropriate shudder here) doing with all the children on a steam train in his Neverland fantasy home. And as for that nose? Well, come on, it was truly bizarre. An old friend — Brian Stoller — turns up to attest to what a great dad he was. ‘Michael had baby-gates all over his house to stop the children falling over.’ Clearly, when you’ve already dangled a child over a hotel balcony, the bar for parenting skills is set pretty low.
There are many surreal images to match this extraordinary tale. Like the moment I am broadcasting live to the one o’clock news when the dawn sprinkler system erupts the length of the picture-perfect suburban close and every camera crew dives for cover to save their equipment. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Vicky, my miracle producer, rooted to the spot and plugging the jetstream with her shoe. And behind me the candles, teddy bears and flowers left in tribute are slithering wistfully downstream.
96 hours later
By day five I am starting to feel like Keeley Hawes from Ashes to Ashes — stuck in an Eighties time warp and struggling to make sense of both worlds. If I can emerge from LA without a nose job I will consider it an assignment well done. For decades the toxic mixture of all things Jackson and all things Hollywood have left most of us shrugging our shoulders, not sure what to believe. Fact in this town is not really a hard currency. As I write, we still don’t know how he died, what was in his will, how he changed colour, or indeed why he could only think up one name — Prince — for both his sons.
It will be no different after his death. His was a particularly grim tale, I can’t help thinking — one to scare the children. A truly talented but desperately unhappy man surrounded by people too afraid — or too greedy — to tell him he’d turned into a freak. And yet, in this age of DIY celebrity and five-hour YouTube fame, his was a celebrity of longevity. He is mourned from Hollywood to Helmand province, danced to in the prisons of the Philippines and Twittered about by Britain’s politicians. Perhaps we just have an undying nostalgia for real superstars. Yes, even those who want their bodies to be preserved forever in a moonwalk pose.
Emily Maitlis is a presenter on Newsnight and BBC News 24.
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