1
The First
Twelve Years
Death, Disease, Abuse,
Neglect, and Other Sordid Tales
of Prepubescence
Childhood trauma increases our risk for pretty much every affliction on the planet. It is the launching point for all the things that can go wrong with our bodies, our minds, our lives. The scientific explanation for this is simple: Early stressors lead to emotional problems, which lead to risky behaviors, which lead to diseases or accidents, which lead to death. And yet, ironically, the creative world owes a great debt to childhood trauma, which can plant the seeds for brilliant artistic achievements. Imagine, for instance, how Josephine Baker’s life might have been different had she not witnessed the race riot of East St. Louis, in 1917. At the age of ten, the future “Bronze Venus” of the Ziegfeld Follies was ripped from her bed by her mother, who pulled her to safety as the city exploded in flames and African Americans were hunted down and clubbed in the streets before her eyes. Would Baker, without this experience, have fled the United States for France? Would she have gone on to become the first African-American female to achieve international stardom?
Josephine Baker
To cite another example, the country singer Patsy Cline had a serious throat infection as a child. Although the disease nearly killed her, Cline later boasted to reporters that she recovered from the infection sounding like Kate Smith, the golden-voiced singer who popularized the song “God Bless America.” Most of us view childhood afflictions as tragic, and they are. However, artists like Baker, Cline, and the ones covered in this chapter prove that a good childhood trauma doesn’t have to go to waste.
These are the tales of how some of the world’s most tortured artists first became tortured.
(1881–1973)
Abstract: A million little pieces
Birth name: Pablo Ruiz y Picasso
Birthplace: Malaga, Spain
Masterwork: Guernica
Demons: Devastation and restoration
“With me, a picture is a sum of destructions.”
—Interview with the art critic Christian Zervos, 1934
Perhaps the easiest way to gauge the illustriousness of any historical figure is by putting his or her last name through the insult test. The more famous the name, the more effectively it doubles as an insult when coupled with a negative adjective. Hence the math challenged among us are said to be “no Einsteins,” the poor are “no Rockefellers,” and if your charcoal sketch of a nude woman looks like something out of the Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases, you will probably be told that you are “no Picasso.” The ironic bite of such insults resides in knowing how impossibly high their eponyms set the bar. A lousy artist may be no Picasso, but then who is? The foremost painter of the twentieth century has one of those names that far outstrip the medium for which they are known.
Rebelliousness, innovation, obsession—for each of these notably Picasso-esque qualities, the artist could thank his father, José Ruiz y Blasco, an art teacher and museum curator. It was José, first and foremost, who recognized Pablo’s extraordinary artistic talent and gave him the training to capitalize on it. Truth be told, it was even José from whom Picasso inherited his famously overactive libido. (José was an avowed bachelor until the age of forty, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider that life expectancy at the time was only forty-two.) When Pablo was seventeen, José handed his paints and brushes to his son and swore off painting for good. Pablo was the genius of the family; that much was clear. In fact, the only thing outpacing Pablo’s talent was his ego, and, before long, the obstinate young artist abandoned all that his father valued in art, including the idea that an artist should be formally trained. However, obstinacy alone does not make a creative pioneer, and had it not been for one horrific incident in Pablo’s early childhood—years before his artistic gifts surfaced—he may have never emerged as the watershed figure of modern art.
On Christmas Day, 1884, the Great Andalusian Earthquake rocked southern Spain, killing as many as 900 people and destroying more than 14,000 houses and buildings. Among those caught in its wake were a three-year-old Pablo and his family, who took refuge in a cave as the city of Malaga crumbled to pieces around them. The trembling ground induced Pablo’s pregnant mother into labor, and the toddler watched with his mouth agape as she gave birth to his younger sister. Though the adult Pablo rarely spoke of the earthquake that almost ended his life, its influence on his psyche became evident years later when the concept of a broken reality emerged as the hallmark characteristic of Cubism, the revolutionary artistic movement that Picasso, along with the French painter Georges Braque, pioneered.
It doesn’t take a neo-Freudian art therapist to view Picasso’s most famous Cubist works as verification that the artist’s inner child had become permanently fractured.
Objects in Cubist works are broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in abstract form. The technique, a bold departure from the Post-Impressionism of the era, abandons modes of perspective that had been used by artists since the Renaissance, renouncing logical space in favor of abstract representations of objects shown from multiple angles at once.
Is it a stretch to trace Picasso’s visionary artistic style to an earthquake? Some experts don’t think so. In her 1988 book, The Untouched Key, the Polish psychologist Alice Miller, who until her death in 2010 was one of the foremost experts on childhood trauma, argued that because the earthquake took place when Picasso was so young, the experience made a permanent mark on his developing mind. Even Picasso’s infamous preoccupation with sex and the female body, Miller reasons, might have been the result of seeing the birth of his sister under such violent circumstances. “How does a woman giving birth look to a three-year-old boy,” Miller asks, “and what happens in the young boy’s psyche when the woman writhing in pain happens to be his mother?”
To be sure, Picasso’s fate as a successful artist was sealed early in his life. But before he had displayed any prodigious gifts, before he rebelled against his father, before his hormones kicked in, he learned, in one fleeting instant, that reality is easily breakable and difficult to restore. It’s interesting to ponder what path he would have taken had the earthquake not shaken his world at such an impressionable age. Given his natural talents, it’s safe to say that Picasso would still have enjoyed a very pleasant career in art. But then he would have been no Picasso. 
(1905–1965)
Abstract: The star who almost wasn’t born
Birth name: Clara Gordon Bow
Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Peak performance: As Betty Lou Spence in It, 1927
Demons: Abuse, neglect, indigence, more abuse
“No one wanted me to be born in the first place.”
—Interview with Motion Picture Classic magazine, 1928
In February 1927, eight short months before minstrel Al Jolson sang “My Mammy” to enthralled moviegoers who had never before heard pictures talk, the ill-fated silent movie industry had itself one last fling: Paramount Pictures’ romantic comedy It, about a flirtatious flapper who develops a crush on her wealthy playboy of a boss, became a runaway box-office hit thanks to the uncompromising sex appeal of its twenty-one-year-old leading lady, Clara Bow. For a medium that required no dialogue, Clara had the perfect tools. Her giant black eyes were as expressive as they were haunted, and her beguiling flits of exuberance could evoke lustful tingles from an audience of asexual spores. She had no formal acting training but could wow directors by laughing hysterically one minute and crying on cue the next. In this fledgling art form called motion pictures, which was less than three decades old and still highly self-conscious, Clara introduced something entirely original: a complete lack of onscreen inhibition. Dubbed the “It” girl, she quickly became a national sensation, personifying the new, sexually liberated woman of the Roaring Twenties. F. Scott Fitzgerald called her “the quintessence of what the term ‘flapper’ signifies … pretty, impudent, superbly assured.” By the spring of 1927, young girls across the country were emulating this brash gadabout who smoked in public, drank gin, flirted openly, cursed, and listened to jazz.
There were other flapper-era starlets, of course—Louise
Brooks, Greta Garbo—but they were poseurs by comparison. Unlike Brooks, who was from rural Kansas, and Garbo, a Swedish immigrant, Clara was a true Jazz Baby, raised in the slums of Brooklyn by an alcoholic father who neglected her and a mentally ill mother who once tried to slice her open with a butcher knife. From the very beginning, she was unwanted and underestimated: Born in July 1905, during a record heat wave that pushed the infant mortality rate to 80 percent, Clara was not expected to survive birth, and in fact her parents never bothered to obtain a birth certificate.
Her earliest years were spent in a poverty-stricken tenement neighborhood where epidemics of smallpox and cholera were the norm and ill-kempt drains filled the hallways with human waste.
When Clara was three, her grandfather, the only relative who had ever shown her any affection, died of a heart attack while pushing her on a swing, prompting her mother to coldly remark to the toddler, “Clara, I wish it had been you.” Clara’s father, a trollish ne’er-do-well who spent most of his time in brothels and saloons, would disappear for days and weeks at a stretch, leaving Clara and her mother to fend for themselves.
On days when Clara’s father was home, he was either ignoring Clara completely or rapping her across the face with his leather razor strop. At school, Clara was tormented by classmates who mimicked her stutter and ridiculed her homemade clothes, which were usually fashioned out of her mother’s old shirtwaists. It was a dreary childhood, a nightmare of Cinderellic proportions, but as Clara once said in an interview, there was at least one place she could go to escape it all: “That was to the motion pictures. I can never repay them what they gave me.”
In an age when we spend every waking hour with our eyeballs glued to computer screens, smart phones, Kindles, iPads, and televisions, it’s easy to forget that there was a time, not so long ago, when none of these things existed. Clara Bow, born at the dawn of the twentieth century, belonged to a unique cohort—the first to grow up watching moving images on a screen. Accordingly, she and her peers were the first to have their minds molded by the subversive ideals of a hilly West Coast district known as Hollywood. As movies took their place atop the entertainment totem pole, their larger-than-life allure gave rise to a new breed of fame-chasing American youth, one that coveted the adoration showered upon the likes of Mary Pickford and Wallace Reid. To the ignored, unloved young Clara, hiding from the world in a dark movie house, such adoration seemed as though it would validate her very existence. All she needed was a break, which came at the age of sixteen when her portrait won the annual “Fame and Fortune” photo contest run by Brewster Publications. Clara, despite the fact that she had never performed on camera, naively hoped to parlay the modest accolade into a full-time movie career.
Her lack of experience turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Whereas other stars of the early screen were victims of their own expertise—theater-bred thespians determined to “act” for the camera lens—Clara knew only how to be herself. Her performances were impulsive and erratic but never contrived. Like the title of her hit film suggested, Clara had “It,” the elusive quality that separates stars from the rest of us. Her intense natural spark helped define a broad new spectrum of femininity—the flirt, the life of the party, the Hollywood sex symbol—but all of these exhibitionist personas were driven by the same unquenchable need for attention and love, two things she never knew in childhood.
After It, Clara became one of the top box-office draws in Hollywood, but her popularity was short lived. On October 6, 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first sound-synched feature film, prompting a technological shift of unprecedented speed and unstoppable force. Within two years, nearly every studio release was a talkie. Clara Bow, like Chaplin, Valentino, and scores of other silent stars, did not successfully make the transition to sound. Her millions of adoring fans had yet to hear her speak, and when she finally did, she sounded more like a sailor than a starlet, spewing a profanity-laced, G-dropping Brooklynese that no amount of dialect coaching could correct. Clara’s cultural cache soon gave way to Betty Boop, the iconic cartoon flapper created partly in her image by animator Grim Natwick. Overnight, the vivacious young actress became a caricature, a relic of the previous decade, whose hard-partying socialite image seemed frivolous and out of touch amid the ensuing years of the Great Depression. In 1933, disgusted and discouraged after a string of commercial failures, Clara quit the film business forever. She was twenty-six.
Cel Damage
In 1930, Fleischer Studios premiered Dizzy Dishes, the first cartoon to feature Betty Boop, a character modeled after Clara Bow. While Clara’s thick Brooklyn accent thwarted the actress’s attempt to transition to sound films, that same trait ironically became one of Betty’s most endearing trademarks. A few years later, however, in what might be described as a bit of cartoon karma, Betty suffered the same fate as Clara, failing to transition successfully into color cartoons.
(1932–2003)
Abstract: Black on the inside
Birth name: J. R. Cash
Birthplace: Kingsland, Arkansas, USA
Masterworks: “I Walk the Line,” “Ring of Fire”
Demons: Guilt
“There’s no way around grief and loss. You can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side.”
—From Johnny Cash: The Autobiography, 1998
Anyone who grew up north of the Mason-Dixon Line has heard the phrase “I hate country music.” What’s interesting, though, is how often we unapologetic Yankees qualify that declaration with the addendum, “but I love me some Johnny Cash.” And why wouldn’t we? The brooding, black-clad singer bridged a stark divide that emerged in the recording industry in the 1950s, as post-Elvis pop singers diverged into two camps and audiences aligned themselves with either the sideburned rebels of rock ’n’ roll or the cowboy-hatted twangsters of country music. Cash, if nothing else, proved that the latter genre is not just for beer-bellied good ole boys who adorn their Ford pickup trucks with busty-girl mud flaps. Everyone, from politicians to pole dancers, can appreciate Johnny Cash (no less than five U.S. presidents have declared themselves fans of the singer), and it’s not just because he looked cool in black and had a baritone voice that could cut through raw iron. Cash endures because his most well-known songs—“I Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire” among them—weave deeply personal narratives with which listeners of all stripes can effortlessly identify. In short, the guy knew how to tell a good story, a skill he may have never discovered had it not been for what is probably the most singularly traumatic childhood event out of any in this chapter.
Imagine going through life feeling responsible for the death of your own brother. Such was the deeply felt—though unearned—guilt that served as the framing device for Johnny Cash’s perpetually black core. His brother’s death occurred just as Johnny was crossing the delicate threshold from preteen to manhood. At that time, he still went by his legal birth name, J. R., so christened because his parents, apparently, could not agree on what to call him.
One morning in May 1944, when J. R. was twelve, he set out to go fishing while his older brother Jack prepared for work at the high school agriculture shop where he had a job cutting timber. The job paid only $3 a day, but the fourteen-year-old Jack felt a strong sense of responsibility to help provide for the struggling Cash family, which included his parents, who picked cotton for a living, and six brothers and sisters. But something did not seem right on that Saturday morning. Both J. R. and Jack were overcome by a lingering sense that tragedy awaited Jack at the wood shop. It was one of those eerie premonitions that, after the fact, leave us wondering why we didn’t just trust our gut instincts. Indeed, J. R. did urge Jack to trust that gut instinct, begging his older brother to blow off work and go fishing with him instead, but Jack, a dutiful lad to a fault, opted for the more responsible choice.
Later that day, the boys’ premonition came to harrowing fruition. Jack, who was apparently working without adult supervision, lost his balance while trying to cut a board. He fell onto a giant head saw, whose whirling, jagged blade sliced him almost in half, creating a gash from his ribcage, down through his stomach, all the way to his groin. The boy did not die instantly, however. Instead, he suffered for several days in a hospital bed, and at one point even showed signs that he might actually get better, despite his doctor’s insistence that a full recovery was impossible. “I had to take out too many of his insides,” the physician told the boy’s parents. Jack succumbed to his injuries the next day. As for
J. R., the future country-music legend never shook off the feeling that he could have somehow prevented the tragedy.
J. R.’s feeling of guilt was exacerbated by his father, Ray, who often bluntly pointed out the irony that the hardworking Jack was killed while J. R., the good-for-nothing layabout who chose fishing over work, lived on. Ray Cash was not exactly an even-tempered sort to begin with (he once shot the family dog because it ate too many table scraps), but Jack’s death opened up a channel through which the hardened old man expressed his favoritism more viciously than ever. Like Clara Bow’s mother decades earlier, Ray Cash made his callous druthers entirely clear, telling J. R. flatly that it should have been he, not Jack, who died on that fateful day. Even the most stoic among us would be wounded by that, but J. R., a Baptist for whom guilt was written into his DNA, carried the burden of his brother’s death for the rest of his days.
“[He] had this real sad guilt thing about him his whole life,” Cash’s daughter Kathy once said of her father. “You could see it in his eyes. You can look at almost any picture and see this dark, sadness thing going on.”
In the months following Jack’s death, the young J. R. became obsessively fixated on the incident. In the summer of 1944, he went to Boy Scout camp and talked of nothing but Jack; however, somewhere between pitching tents and learning how to tie square knots, J. R.’s fellow scouts grew tired of hearing him drone on about his dead brother. Eventually they told him it was time to give it a rest. “I got the message,” Cash said. “I quit talking about Jack altogether. Everybody knew how I felt and how my mother felt; they didn’t need us telling them.”
Cash rarely spoke of the tragedy after that, but then it’s not the kind of thing one shrugs off either. Instead, the grieving boy entered puberty in an endless pursuit of escapist reveries, losing himself in radio dramas, westerns, and oral tales of the Old Frontier told by the various vagabonds who passed through his small Arkansas town. These seemingly pedestrian pastimes taught J. R. something invaluable about the art of storytelling. He learned that stories have to have purpose, a core, something for people to grab onto. Aimless blathering, he soon realized, does not appeal to listeners’ sympathies, even if it concerns something as profound as a brother’s death. J. R.’s informal education in storytelling equipped him with skills to craft sharp, accessible narratives, a talent he used when later writing the songs that would bring him worldwide acclaim. From his first commercial hit, “Cry, Cry, Cry,” in which the protagonist laments the trysts of his unfaithful lover, to the folk-inspired “Folsom Prison Blues,” in which a convict listens longingly to the sounds of the outside world, Cash’s songs gave a crisp structure to willfully somber topics.
The day Jack Cash died was the day the sad, soulful, brooding Johnny Cash was born. It created the heaviness of spirit that transformed him into the original Man in Black—a country star whose dark wardrobe was less a style choice than the reflection of a perpetually dark inner being.
(1928–1987)
Abstract: The unsightly celebrity apprentice
Birth name: Andrew Warhola Jr.
Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Masterworks: Campbell’s Soup Cans, Brillo Boxes
Demons: Disease and self-hatred
“I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.”
—From The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975
You have to hand it to Andy Warhol. For a silly-looking guy reminiscent of Gollum in a mad-scientist wig, he had, and still has, the ability to ruffle feathers among folks who take art seriously. The seminal pop artist was an interesting character, no doubt, but was he a true artist? Such is the question that has occupied critics, aesthetes, and pretty much anyone who has an opinion about art since Warhol first surfaced in the 1950s.
Long before Andy emerged as the timid oddity of New York City counterculture, he was the timid oddity of Holmes Elementary School in Depression-era Pittsburgh. From his earliest interactions with his peers, Andrew Warhola, the son of Slovakian immigrants, was beset by hypersensitivity—a kid for whom socializing was an ordeal of the most terrifying variety. On his first day of kindergarten, he got slapped in the face by a little girl and, through tears, vowed to his mother that he would never return to school again.
But it was in 1936, when Andy entered the third grade, that he went from mere oddity to object of ridicule. His life was upended that year by a serious bout with chorea, a neurological condition thought to be a complication of scarlet fever. Undiagnosed at first, the disease covered him with reddish-brown blotches on his face, back, chest, arms, and hands. It also caused thinning hair and involuntary muscle movements. The eight-year-old Andy was tormented by his classmates, who would mock his shaking hands when he tried to write on the blackboard. The experiences pushed him further and further into isolation until finally, after a doctor identified the condition, his mother took him out of school altogether.
If ever there had been any question of Andy’s role as the delicate flower of the Warhola family, his disease put such doubts to rest. Far more squeamish than his two older brothers, Andy had long proven himself the sensitive one, the one who needed special care, and his mother, Julia, had gotten into the habit of coddling him to the extreme. But now, in his ailing state, Andy was at the mercy of this overprotective woman. Though well intentioned, Julia was a chronic doter, a maternal force of Pink Floydian scope, and her smothering presence inadvertently squeezed out any ounce of self-esteem he had left. “She made him feel insignificant,” a friend of Andy’s later noted. “She made him feel that he was the ugliest creature that God put on this earth.”
It was during this low period in Andy’s life, a time when he felt the most helpless and hideous, that the future Prince of Pop Art began to develop an intense fascination with beauty and celebrity, a fascination that would define him as an artist.
Bedridden for several weeks, he escaped into the fantasy world of movie magazines and the glamorous culture of 1930s screen stars. He lost himself in glossy photographs of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich; their beauty and poise, their airbrushed perfection, represented everything he was not. He steadied his hand tremors long enough to cut out the photos and make collages of his favorite stars. This was the world Andy dreamed of joining, and yet he already sensed that it was an elite club to which he could never really belong.
As Andy plodded through adolescence and into young adulthood, the blotches on his skin slowly began to fade, mostly clearing up by the time he graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. His first taste of professional success came in the 1950s, in New York City, where he found work as a commercial illustrator for magazines and ad agencies. However, it was as a fine artist, in the 1960s, that Andy began to attract the attention of the art world with his silkscreen paintings of celebrities and household products. The images, smooth and machinelike in appearance, stood in proud contrast to the stringy and cluttered Abstract Expressionism that dominated New York’s art scene at the time. Pollock’s and de Kooning’s canvas-abusing tactics, with their gestural brushstrokes and antifigurative compositions, felt like old hat next to Andy’s fetish for mass-produced iconography, which challenged the very idea of what fine art could be.
However, if success as an artist validated Andy’s creative ambitions, it did little to quell his negative self-image. As an invalid, he had learned what it meant to be the thing society values least—a disposable human being. But as a pop artist, he would force society to rethink the value of things it once deemed disposable: Campbell’s Soup cans, Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles. His desire to give these objects equal face time with Marilyn, Elvis, and Liz Taylor sprung from a futile longing to be one of the beautiful people. Nevertheless, he remained determined, throughout his career, to dissolve the barriers between beauty and ugliness, and in the process he blurred the line between art and commerce.
There is still, of course, the matter of Warhol’s endless detractors, who insist that the man was nothing more than a champion of consumerism cloaked in pseudo-avant-gardery. To them, Andy’s nonchalant oddness opened the floodgates for a “do it because it’s weird” philosophy that still haunts the art world in the form of elephant dung, silent raves, and boxes of rocks. Admittedly, it’s hard to argue that a rough childhood is an acceptable excuse for making people sit through a five-hour movie about some guy sleeping, but then Warhol’s critics still miss an important point. Anyone can censure artistic pretense from behind The New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section, but only Andy Warhol, who had come face-to-face with his own grotesqueness, could have mocked that world from within its own pretentious circles, and decades after the fact, it’s easy to see that he was in on the joke. After looking at his work, one might very well come to the conclusion that a painting of a Coke bottle is no more a work of art than the syrupy drink it represents, but we’re at least forced to think about it. To Andy, that was the point. “A Coke is a Coke,” he once wrote. “No amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same, and all the Cokes are good.”
(1958–2009)
Abstract: The good son goes bad
Birth name: Michael Joseph Jackson
Birthplace: Gary, Indiana, USA
Masterwork: Thriller
Demons: Name it.
“I don’t know if I was his golden child or whatever, but he was very strict, very hard, very stern. Just a look would scare you.”
—Speaking about his father in an interview with Oprah
Winfrey, 1993
Michael Jackson was a true American tragedy. Swept up by a tornado of attention in early childhood, the pop singer skyrocketed to the top of the entertainment food chain only to descend like a uni-gloved fallen angel into tabloid freakdom. And yet he was a monster of our own making, a Frankenstein’s creature spawned by a fickle American public that is eager to grant celebrity status and even more eager to kick the pedestal out from under those upon whom celebrity status has been bestowed. Jackson’s life has always been viewed under a dual lens: part microscope, part kaleidoscope. But ever since his death from propofol intoxication in 2009, it has become all but impossible to distinguish between the different personages of the Jacksonian Trinity. The man, the myth, the monster—they are one and the same now. Jackson may have defined the sound and style of a generation, but the peculiarities of his existence will forever footnote his achievements.
True, he is among the most recognizable entertainers in history, but he also hung out with a chimpanzee, dangled his son over a balcony, and shared a bed with Macaulay Culkin. Further tarnishing his legacy are the multiple claims by parents that he sexually abused their children. Add it all up and you have a downright maddening composite of artistry, criminality, and legend.
Few people will argue that Michael Jackson was not a quintessential example of a tortured artist. The problem is that determining what tortured him can be an overwhelming, kid-in-a-candy-store experience for anyone who seeks to unearth such things. Pick a personal demon, and chances are Jackson was tortured by it. He grew up dirt poor, one of nine brothers and sisters who lived shoulder-to-shoulder in a two-bedroom hovel. He spent his childhood in constant fear of Joe Jackson, the tyrannical father who, whip in hand, pushed Michael and his brothers into show business. He went through his awkward stage in front of the entire world, singing and dancing like a trained seal as the reluctant front-boy of the phenomenally successful group the Jackson Five. Later he became plagued by an unyielding perfectionism that, combined with a self-hating streak, resulted in endless plastic surgeries. And, of course, underlying all of these issues was the question of his sexual orientation, if we are to believe he even had one.
But none of Jackson’s demons would have meant a thing if it weren’t for the astounding effect he had on pop music as a solo artist—
a feat that has solidified his permanence as a central figure of the 1980s. When aliens land on Earth and ask us to sum up the decade, all we will need to do is whip out the iconic 1984 photograph of Jackson flanked by the Reagans in front of the South Portico of the White House.
Jackson’s era-defining presence is unmatched, and for that he can thank his single most salient personal demon: his desire to break free from the insurmountable control of his dictatorial father. Not much about Joe Jackson will come as a shock. He is essentially a broad caricature of the American showbiz parent: controlling, abusive, shamelessly exploitive. Once an aspiring rhythm-and-blues musician himself, he abandoned those dreams to raise a family. But when he discovered that the family he was raising, particularly Michael, had inherited his musical gifts, he saw a vicarious opportunity. He also saw a meal ticket, a way to escape the steel mills of Indiana in which he worked as a crane operator. Early rehearsals for the Jackson Five were like boot camp. Joe would watch with a belt in his hands, making sure the children performed as they should. “You could not mess up,” Michael said. “If you didn’t do it the right way, he would tear you up, really get you.”
Joe’s abuse was not just physical, nor did it end when the Jackson Five found success in the early 1970s. When Michael hit puberty, his father, like a festering canker sore, was right there to aggravate his growing pains. Just as the group’s popularity was beginning to wane, Michael’s self-hating tendencies kicked into full gear. He looked in the mirror and saw kinky hair and a shovel-shaped nose at a time when other young stars of the era looked like Keith Partridge. Indeed, the tabloid rumor that Michael once sought to purchase the bones of the Elephant Man was at least grounded in a truth that the singer felt a kinship with the disfigured Englishman Joseph Merrick. (“He reminds me of me a lot.”) Joe Jackson didn’t help matters, calling his son ugly and teasing him when his skin broke out in acne—all as a means to keep Michael under his control.
When Michael was twenty years old, however, something happened that would help him finally free himself: He teamed up with the producer Quincy Jones. The two first worked together on the set of the 1978 film version of The Wiz. The film was a critical and financial flop, but Jones, who adapted it from its original stage version, saw in Michael something that Joe Jackson apparently never bothered to look for: potential as a creative artist. Joe never had a problem exploiting his son’s immense talent, but allowing Michael creative control had always been out of the question.
Quincy Jones felt the opposite way. Upon working with Michael the first time, he believed, instantly, that deep within this trained seal lurked a creative genius. “It was that wonderment that I saw in his eyes that locked me in,” he once said. “I knew that we could go into completely unexplored territory.” Jones thought so highly of Michael’s potential that when the singer asked him to recommend a producer, Jones volunteered. Michael, who saw in Jones the encouraging father figure he never had, agreed to let him take the reins.
The result was the 1979 album Off the Wall, a palatable combination of disco, jazz, soft ballads, and synth-pop. The album was a runaway success, the first in history to produce more than three top-ten singles on the Billboard charts. It heralded not only the rebirth of Michael Jackson as an artist but also the birth of the 1980s. And yet there was even more to come. As big as Off the Wall was, it would ultimately pale in comparison to Michael and Jones’s second collaboration. Thriller, released in 1982, became one of the defining soundtracks of the decade and remains to this day the bestselling album of all time.
Unfortunately, Michael’s surrogate father–son bond with Jones was not enough to undo the abuse inflicted by Joe Jackson. The years of regimented rehearsals and fear of being reprimanded saddled him with a perfectionist attitude that he would never shake. Watch footage of his performances: Every note, every dance step, is calculated with nuanced precision. But it was the combination of that precision coupled with the creative freedom granted by Quincy Jones that ignited the worldwide pop explosion he became. And what of Michael’s tragic third act—the tabloid “wacko” and bizarre sideshow? Considering his one-time mythic celebrity status, such an outcome was probably inevitable. Nature has a way of balancing things out. Consequently, Michael’s legacy will always be dubious, caught in a tug of war between national treasure and American tragedy.
(1756–1791)
Abstract: The first case against child stardom
Birth name: Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
Birthplace: Salzburg, Austria
Masterwork: The Abduction from the Seraglio
Demons: Impossible expectations
“It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me.”
—A remark to Conductor Kucharz, Prague, 1787
What the hell was wrong with Mozart? Few questions in the vast canons of tortured-artist scholarship have produced more theories than this one. According to the British Medical Journal, the psychiatric community has, over the years, ascribed to the composer no less than twenty-seven distinct mental illnesses. For instance, his tremendous creative output was the result of manic-depressive disorder; his poor people skills, Asperger’s syndrome; his fondness for scatological humor, a sign of Tourette’s. You get the idea. It’s as if an official diagnosis is the only way to account for his extraordinary abilities.
And extraordinary they were.
Mozart was composing and sight-reading music at an age when most of us are still trying to master the sippy cup. As an adult, he could work out entire symphonies in his head and transcribe them to paper without making a single error, sometimes while playing billiards on the side.
However, the damaging psychological impact of his music career was not so different from that of any number of former child stars whose glazed mug shots sometimes show up on Gawker. The highs and lows of Mozart’s life resulted from the forced immersion into show business and celebrity culture. Sound familiar? Adjust the circumstances for eighteenth-century Austria, and Wolfgang starts to look a lot like Michael Jackson in a puffy shirt. Indeed, the lives of these two precocious music artists were so eerily similar that one wonders if Wolfgang did not somehow successfully lobby for reincarnation.
In the preceding profile, we saw how Joe Jackson, Michael’s dictatorial father, left no opportunistic stone unturned as he exploited his young son’s musical talents, hoping to elevate the Jackson family from their humble Indiana roots. Similarly, Mozart’s own father, Leopold, was keen on profiting from his son’s gifts as soon as they began to surface. He wasted no time in parading his toddler around the royal courts of Munich, Vienna, and Prague, astonishing throngs of aristocrats with Wolfgang’s ability to play impeccable pieces of music with his doll-sized hands. Leopold, a washed-up composer by the time Wolfgang was born, knew the potential value of his son’s talent and was eager to abandon his work as a teacher to assume the role of master showman, touting the abilities of his son with ringmaster-like flare. According to Leopold’s own description, raw genius like Wolfgang’s “probably comes to light but once in a century.”
That all of this profiteering and exploitation might be considered poor parenting is not an idea unique to modern times. Just as Joe Jackson has received much criticism for denying Michael a normal childhood in exchange for child stardom, Leopold Mozart got his share of flack for cash-cowifying young Wolfgang. To his critics, Leopold would assert his convenient belief that Wolfgang’s talent was a gift from God and so he had a divine duty to share that gift with the world. Wolfgang, like any child star who is thrust into the limelight, learned to crave praise like a drug—with unchecked vanity as a side effect.
However, his vanity turned on him after a serious case of smallpox disfigured his face with pitted scars. (He was eleven at the time and already extremely fussy about his appearance.) His self-loathing became more severe as he grew older but not taller. The fact that he barely topped five feet always humiliated him, as did his large nose, which he surely would have butchered, Jackson-style, had plastic surgery been a viable option.
As an adult, Wolfgang, like Michael, came to a moment when he finally resolved to break free of his oppressive father. That ultimate act of rebellion led him to ditch his native Salzburg, in 1781, and carve out a career for himself in Vienna, where he experienced an astounding creative awakening. The following year, he composed the German Singspiel opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, commissioned by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II. The opera was heralded throughout the German-speaking world as a groundbreaking achievement. Goethe, Germany’s most prominent author at the time, said it “knocked everything else sideways.” It was Mozart’s Thriller, a veritable pop-music phenomenon that signified his transition from prodigal parlor trick to gifted composer.
Which brings us back to the question of what the hell was wrong with Mozart. The answer is perhaps more prosaic than his genius deserves. His life certainly panned out in a way consistent with child-star tragedies of today. After achieving early success, he spent his thirties plagued by financial problems, difficulty in finding work, and ill health. Mozart lived his final years in a state of constant depression, his ego shattered by his diminishing fame. The illness that caused his death at the age of thirty-five remains a mystery, although the medical community has offered more than its fair share of possible diagnoses (140 at last count). In the end, however, Mozart was not a tortured prodigy who happened to become a child star, but a tortured child star who happened to be a prodigy.
Aural Apocalypse
Mozart’s uncanny musical gift was not without its shortcomings. In fact, the same razor-sharp sense of sound that allowed him to pinpoint musical notes with impeccable precision also plagued him with hypersensitive hearing. As a young boy, his growing ears were so delicate that he could not bear the shrilly sound of a trumpet solo until he reached the age of ten. In 1766, the renowned Swiss neurologist Samuel Tissot even wrote an article about the boy Mozart’s sensitivity, noting that “wrong, harsh, or excessively loud sounds” often brought the young boy to tears. It’s ironic that the high-pitched laugh made famous by Tom Hulce in the 1984 film Amadeus would probably have made the real Mozart want to jump headfirst into the Danube River.