AMBASSADOR HOTEL
DEEP THROAT
FOREVERLAND
LITTLE HOUSE
ROADKILL DAN
SLIDE PROJECTORS
KIM BAUER
THE POLYPHONIC
SPREE
TEENAGE VIRGINS
STEVEN COJOCARU
MICHAEL JACKSON
DEATH OF CASSETTES
JACKASSES
UROLOGY MUSEUM
MISSING MUSIC
HERB RITTS
GUITAR HEAVEN
MORMON UNDERWEAR
BILL HANNA
JAKE RYAN
Trial of a Century
In Santa Maria, It Only Seems Like It's Been 100 Years
(The Washington Post | Mar. 20, 2005)
By Hank Stuever
SANTA MARIA, Calif.-- The former housekeeper is sworn in, sits nervously at the witness stand and spells her name for the court: Kiki Fournier. She is in her mid-thirties, has dark blond hair cut plainly in a working-mom's bob and is wearing a canary-yellow sweater and dark pants. One of the first questions the district attorney has is whether she tried to get out of testifying in California v. Michael Jackson. "Yes," she says.
"Why is that?" he asks.
"I don't want to have anything to do with this," she says. "I just -- I don't like being the center of attention, ever."
For all the time Fournier put in at Neverland -- working as a Jackson employee from 1991 to 2003, picking up after him, serving his meals, mopping his floors -- she is now being rewarded with a day spent under oath in Foreverland, the meticulously conducted and seemingly unending child-molestation trial of one of the world's most famous (and by reputation most weird) human beings.
Fournier testifies that she saw visiting boys run amok at Neverland Ranch, about what kind of messes they made and how it got bad enough once in a while that she nicknamed the place "Pinocchio's Pleasure Island." She talks about how some of Jackson's young friends threw popcorn in the theater or wrecked golf carts on the grounds. How sometimes they appeared drunk.
It takes most of Thursday to cross-examine her on this and other matters -- such as, how long she's been working to get a community college degree. "You're going to embarrass me," she tells Jackson's defense lawyer, revealing that she started taking classes in 1987 and still hasn't finished. Her stomach growls so loudly at one point that the microphone picks it up, and she blushes, and the judge reminds counsel to have witnesses bring "an energy bar" with them when they show up to court, since there is no lunch break in Foreverland. (Food shows up for the jury from the Olive Garden, and the jurors are admonished.)
Fournier could be your sister. When finally she is dismissed, she walks up the aisle and pushes open the courtroom doors to leave. In that instant, the media photographers in the foyer take her picture. Their flash strobes quietly go fwitsh, fwitsh. The wire services lead that day with her testimony. ("Neverland Housekeeper: Kids Ran Wild.") She is part of it now.
California v. Michael Jackson is a criminal trial, but if you sit on a metal folding chair in an oversize trailer behind the county courthouse watching it on a 35-inch RCA closed-circuit television set (as most of the press does, partly so they can make smart-alecky comments during the proceedings) for a stretch of several days, you also begin to see it as an epic fable: How the values of a 20th-century celebriculture came home to roost in the 21st.
It's about a boy who was famous as a child, perhaps too famous, who has said he suffered some sort of psychological wound from it forced by his domineering stage father to perform, even at the times he wished only to play. He parlayed his shyness and excessive talent into a global sensation. Rich beyond imagination, he set about making up for a lost childhood and redesigned his body as well.
He met a boy who was not famous, who lived with his sister and brother and two unhappily married parents in a one-room studio apartment in East Los Angeles. The mother, if some evidence is to be believed, had a showbiz bug, too. She enrolled her children in a summertime "comedy camp" for underprivileged kids at a Sunset Boulevard nightclub, where they met a few famous people, some of whom, when Christmas came around, showed up at their door with big sacks from Best Buy.
Then, in 2000, the boy got cancer, which, bizarrely, can be a one-in-a-million path to a certain style of fame in America, in the way that people suddenly care about your suffering, despite whatever suffering (troubles in school, abusive father, a charge of shoplifting) preceded it.
When you have a disease that leaves you as bald and vulnerable as when you were an infant, Hollywood might want to have its picture taken with you, or might bring you courtside to a Lakers game. As on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," Hollywood might even come and rebuild and refurnish your family's house.
Celebrities have an almost inexplicable need to be near sick kids. Someone from the Make-a-Wish Foundation comes to your hospital room and asks you to make one. Michael Jackson calls your hospital room. Not just once, but 20 times, and you can talk to him, unless you're already busy with sitcom star George Lopez, movie star Chris Tucker, or the local weatherman, or trying to place calls to Jay Leno.
Michael calls again. Michael talks to you for hours. "We were broken," the mother says in video footage from 2003, pursing her ruby-red lips in a rehearsed, Hallmarky sadness (the jury has now watched this avowal of the curative powers of Jackson three times, courtesy of the defense). "We were broken and Michael fixed us."
So the family went to Neverland, over and over again, and on one of those early visits, Jackson made a short music video with the boy. The jury has watched that, too: Pop icon and sickly thin child stroll hand-in-hand across the Neverland grounds, over a bridge, and then they spread out a blanket by a pond and sit, as lovers might. The soundtrack is Michael singing: "Smile, though your heart is aching / Smile even though it's breaking."
For what purpose this tape was meant is unknown, but it was destined to be given an exhibit number and entered into evidence. The family is presumed broken again; the jurors will decide to what extent Jackson had anything to do with that.
In normal traffic, it takes 35 minutes to get from Neverland to Foreverland. Outside the front gate of the ranch on Figueroa Mountain Road, there are sometimes fans who've slept in their cars, their stereos blasting Jackson songs you've never even heard. (Others sleep four to a room at the Stardust Motel or the Econo Lodge in Santa Maria, so they can get to court early, for seats.)
Unless there is faux-breathless drama to be had -- bench warrants! A motorcade race along the 101! Blue pajama bottoms! -- what strikes you most about California v. Michael Jackson is how normal it all seems, how scripted in its peripheral set details, how everyone and everything are promptly in their appointed places at the county courthouse on weekdays at 8:15 a.m.
This saga could not happen without shaggy palm trees set against a brilliant California morning sky. (The only other backdrop, sometimes, is a dull, whitish fog from the Pacific, about 20 miles west of here.) The typically brown hills have been turned Irish green from record rainfall.
It could not happen without the television cameras. It could not happen without the guy behind the fence on South Miller Street who screams, "Michael's innocent! Michael's innocent!" until he is almost hoarse. On some mornings, this devotee is joined by a few others, and on other mornings there is only another fan or two with him; and on some recent mornings, he has been alone. The need for crowd control and circus management has yet to present itself; Santa Barbara County scaled back some of its sheriff detail, and Santa Maria police did, too.
What a letdown to get all the way here and not find the apocalyptic, post-modern melee you'd hoped for and also dreaded. What a letdown to find out there are sometimes empty seats in the courtroom, and anyone can have them.
Most of all it could not happen (doesn't happen) without Michael. Two black SUVs pull up and everything stops. People never tire of watching Jackson simply get himself here. You can watch it nine times in a row and still find that you stop whatever you're saying or doing when the motorcade arrives, so that you can lean against a barricade and watch it for the 10th time:
The bodyguards step out and look around. Then his nearly ossified parents, Joe and Katherine, step out and look back toward the car. Then there is a pause just a few seconds too long. You wonder at this moment most of all what Michael Jackson is thinking.
Then the umbrella.
Then Michael.
He moves along the sidewalk with the care of a person made of porcelain, toward the entrance, and the whole world watches. He turns and waves once. Reporters are scribbling . . . what? ("Burgundy jacket." "Flashes peace sign.") To see it for yourself is to know a special underwhelmedness.
The great courtroom dramas of our era (O.J., Scott Peterson, Michael) take place in unremarkable courtrooms, nothing like the movies. Where Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville presides, the primary interior details are the drop-panel ceiling, the gray carpet, the indeterminate wood that reminds you of home-office computer desks at Staples.
But the bailiff, Leslie Avila, takes pride in the place. In two dishes on her desk she keeps candy and lozenges, of which Michael Jackson often avails himself. Before court one morning, she sweetly tells the reporters that when they rip pages out of their notebooks, little flecks of paper fall onto the floor, and it is she, Leslie, who has to pick them up every day. So, please, she asks, be aware of that.
Melville is 63. He and his wife like to compete in weekend "team penning" horse competitions (the goal is to separate horses from a herd and corral them). He is a recovering alcoholic who said in a 2001 interview that he's been sober more than 25 years and that this has helped him, as a judge, understand some of the problems of the defendants who come before him. He has a sense of humor, doing whatever he can to keep the spectacle outside at bay. He announces Thursday that on Tuesday he will have to cut testimony short, so that he may attend the dedication ceremony of a new county juvenile detention center -- "and of course you're all invited," he says with sarcasm. When the jury goes home on a Friday, he bids them a loving farewell, with a singsong toodle-oo: "Goodbye!" he says, waving. "I'll see you Monday."
Although there can really be no jury of Jackson's peers, this is a true sampling of those who walk through the wide valley of middle-class ideals. They look as if they were pulled out of a checkout line at a Von's supermarket. You will never see them on the news until it's all over, and then they will look like the people who show up on the news in incidental anonymous background shots. ("How high will gas prices get for your family trip this summer?" "Are Americans eating too much?")
What an annoyance for pleasant, friendly Santa Maria (pop: 85,000) to be chosen as the place to try Jackson. But what a symbolic gift to foreign reporters (from France, from Britain, from Japan, from Brooklyn, from The Washington Post), who almost always mention the strawberry fields and relative inactivity: Here is America. There is one Target, one Home Depot, one Costco, one Big!Lots, six freeway exits and endless taco stands. Here is something as extraterrestrial as Michael Jackson, having to drag out of bed early every morning, do his makeup and land his spacecraft amid all this plain life.
We in the press corps pay particular attention to Jackson's coiffure, especially any sign of its appearing askew and more wiggish. Hair is just another unknown in the Jackson case. Not just Jackson's hair but mysteries about everyone else's: Why does his publicist have hers straightened and dyed blond? Does his mother wear a wig, and is it the same one every day? Why does his attorney, Thomas Mesereau Jr., wear his white hair in a Prince Valiant pageboy? Why does MSNBC legal analyst Anne Bremner wear an enormous, "I Dream of Jeannie" blond fall tacked onto her head? Jackson is far from the only person in heavy makeup and questionable hair at his own trial -- the men and women of television are made up, their hair highlighted, their teeth whitened. There's something freaky about all of us, in the end. We are all altered in the modern sense.
The accuser is 15, and in his four days on the stand, he was asked not only about what Jackson allegedly did to him when he was 13 but about what he has done to himself.
Imagine being a teenage boy and asked to tell the court and several dozen media reporters about the following things: What each of nine teachers said about you in disciplinary reports, even going back to seventh grade, which is ancient times. Whether you shoplifted. What you've ever had to drink that had alcohol in it, and when, and how much. How many times your father and mother fought, before the divorce, and in what ways did your father verbally or physically abuse you or her before you never saw him again. When you first masturbated. What your grandmother told you about masturbation vs. what Jackson told you about masturbation.
For all the small and large contradictions in their testimony against Jackson, the accuser and his siblings are certain of one thing: The past tense of the verb "to stay" is "stood." Therefore, "We stood at Neverland," the sister says. "We stood at the Calabasas Inn" after one of a series of escapes from Neverland, the brother says. "We stood at Michael's hotel," the accuser says. "Then when we got back, we stood at Neverland again."
"We're good talkers," the mother appears to say during an on-camera break in the taping of the 2003 video, the one where she and her children go on and on about how much they love Michael.
The rest of us stood, and will go on stooding, among the barricades and fences, sitting in our "media overflow" trailer, or sitting in an available courtroom chair, parsing the trial as it slowly winds toward conclusion or disaster. After the accuser left the stand, the week took on the air of a misbegotten First Amendment case, as detective after detective took the stand to identify each object seized from Jackson's home: books!
"Are you aware," Mesereau asks one detective in cross-examination, "that these books are all available on Amazon.com?" The detective is not aware. In fact, from Deputy J.L. Doughnut to Lt. Pizza Break, the law enforcement officers seem happily unhip, not knowing of L.A.-based publisher Taschen's catalogue of titles, or that Bruce Weber is a photographer for Vanity Fair who has spent a career photographing delectable young men at play in pastoral swimmin' holes. They know not that people collect oddball German nudist magazines from the 1950s as form of kitsch. What would be perfectly normal on a Manhattan coffee table has the misfortune of looking strongly suspect to the long arm of the law in the Santa Ynez Valley, more evidence of the cultural disconnects that split Americans.
Jackson's pornography ("commercially available adult material," if it please the court) is of the sort that is widely available, shrink-wrapped and behind-counter in most 7-Elevens -- Penthouse, Club, Barely Legal. And there's a buried lead in all of this: Jackson apparently digs naked chicks, as in women, as in over 18. (But the prosecution will contend that a predator like Jackson keeps this stuff around merely to lure pubescent boys.)
In the media room, the reporters at first jump up excitedly and get closer to the monitor when the DA puts each piece of tawdry evidence up on the "ovo," which is court-speak for overhead projector. Journalistic giddiness abounds when the words "Your honor, I'm going to need the ovo" are spoken.
But now . . . ho-hum, another issue of Barely Legal. There is less darting outside to make a call to the news desk. It takes a lot of time to present each piece of evidence, give it a number, show it to the witness, then perhaps show it to the jury on the ovo.
In the courtroom, this drags into the afternoon. You notice that the Associated Press's grande dame of courtroom journalism isn't writing down much; in fact, her head is lolling snoozily, snapping awake at intervals. The courtroom sketch artist has stopped sketching for now. The minute hand on the clock appears not to move, and neither does Jackson. This is Foreverland.
