Covering the bizarre trial of Michael Jackson

I dropped my son off at school this morning and all the eight-year-olds were talking about in the playground was the death of the 50-year-old King of Pop.

Last night I stayed up late to watch the curtain fall on Michael Jackson with fascination and bewilderment, largely because of the tiny walk-on part I played in his final tragic act.

I first hit the Jackson trail when he was arrested on the charges of child abuse which now cast a long shadow over his memory. Our editor had asked us to talk to the black community in South Central Los Angeles about the rise and fall of the superstar.

But my abiding memory is driving around the city with the car windows wound down and listening to Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough and rediscovering how fabulous his music was.

We made a film charting the way the TV helicopters hounded Jacko on his way to court, just as they had hounded another black man, OJ Simpson, as he sped down the LA freeways after his wife had been murdered a few years before.

And we looked at the dilemma in the black community of what to make of a pop icon now accused of child abuse, a black icon whose police mugshot made him look like Elizabeth Taylor, an icon whose facial skin seemed to be turning white.

In 2005 I was sent with my team to the courthouse in the little town of Santa Maria, California, to cover the trial, and I look back on that trip as amongst the most bizarre of my reporting career.

Most of the time we watched the court’s proceedings on TV from a “spillover” room next door. Hundreds of pages of sworn affidavits had been leaked on the internet, so we knew pretty much what the prosecution wanted the witnesses to say, and much of it was awful and compelling.

The only dilemma in reporting it was what to leave out. There were tales of secret doors in the Neverland ranch, and of “Jesus Juice” – what Jackson allegedly called the alcohol he was accused of giving children, hidden in cans of Coke.

Then there was Diane Dimond. Feisty and diminutive and – apart from a lady from Vanity Fair magazine – THE expert on the trial, whose live pronouncements for Court TV, day after day and week after week, were considered by many of us the ultimate authority.

The other character you had to know in the media circus was the ringmaster, Peter, a man in a stetson hat who gave out press tickets to sit in court, and who allowed me to sit inside on the day the child testified that Jacko was not just Wacko but far, far worse.

Jackson was found innocent, largely because of the courtroom oratory of his lawyer, a former boxer named Tom Mesereau, but not one reporter I met covering the trial believed the verdict.

Jackson seemed to be wearing a black dinner jacket most days, but one day he turned up late wearing his pyjamas. In court, Michael munched his way through a bowl of peppermints and constantly dabbed at his reconstructed nose with white tissues.

One day I stood next to him and his brother Jermaine as they milled about during a brief adjournment. “How are you, Michael?” I asked him. “Okay,” he said in an unconvincing high-pitched squeak. It was as if the whoops and yelps from Billie Jean had become his speaking voice.

I once interviewed a couple of people close to Howard Hughes. One of his personal assistants recalled how the billionaire spent his final years, watching television in bed in a hotel he had bought in Las Vegas, refusing to go outside and refusing cut his fingernails or hair for months on end.

“He looked like Moses”, the man said. In terms of eccentricity, Jackson was right up there with Hughes and suffered a similar curse; the curse of being ill-advised and unloved, for all his talent and wealth.

Court would often end early, so the jurors could get back to their jobs or children. And then we would head off into the vineyards around Jackson’s home town of Los Olivos and drink Californian pinot noir among the golden hills around Neverland, where the superstar had tried and failed to find happiness. The next day, it was back to court to hear more tales of the grotesque.

As I said, it was a bizarre trip. Michael, RIP.