Carrie Fisher - Shockaholic

The bill was paid. The evening was at an end. We began walking down the stairs toward the futures that lay beyond the dark that awaited us outside.

“Would you have sex with Chris in a hot tub?” Senator Kennedy asked me, perhaps as a way to say good night?

“I’m no good in water,” I told him.

And that’s where that memory ends.

I did not know Michael Jackson thatwell, at least not in the sense that I think of as knowing someone. But in the climate that developed in the wake of his death, to not have known him well was, for some, enough to be seen as having known him intimately. And from this certain skewed slant, I could even be perceived as one of Michael’s closest friends.

He and I had just two people in common. Michael was very close pals with a former stepmother of mine, Elizabeth Taylor, and we had the same dermatologist. I would say we shared the same dermatologist, but that sounds so unsanitary. Especially when that dermatologist is Arnold Klein, the original fount from which all collagen and Botox could flow.

The thing is, I do know Arnie Klein well, and Arnie—the Dermatologist to the Stars—was fastened at his rather ample hip to Michael’s very skinny one. You see, they each had something that the other desperately coveted. Arnie wanted to be friends with not just an otherwise inaccessible celebrity but the biggest star on the planet for him and his friends to cavort with. (“Ben, this is my friend, Michael! Michael, this is my friend, Ben… the guy I told you about!”) Michael wanted access to the farthest reaches of the medical community 24–7, at a speed and with an ease that would ordinarily be unavailable to almost anyone at all, at any level. Therein lay the swap.

I’m not saying that this was the sole reason for their friendship. Far from it. Michael trusted Arnie. He trusted him enough to choose one of his nurses to have children for him. Yes, I know. A very strange/unusual way to demonstrate trust, but there you have it. “Hollywood” is an unusual place. And where celebrity is a factor, things become less predictable.

The moment that I actually met Michael is vague in my memory, as is—have I mentioned it?—quite a bit these days. You would think that meeting someone as unique as Michael would somehow stay in my mind, but unique was not extraordinary to me. I’d become, if not immune to its charms, then certainly fairly far from thrilled.

To be sure, Michael was very unusual. For one thing, his relationship to his appearance was… let’s be kind and call it atypical. That he could have consistently hammered away at his perfectly nice original face until he arrived at that strange place he paused at—that he was able to look in the mirror and essentially say, “Yes. This is a face I’m more comfortable presenting to the world than the one I was born with.”—well, the word “dysmorphic” doesn’t approach it, let alone cover it.

Michael was, to say the least, out of the ordinary— miles out. Somewhere that leaves ordinary far behind. But to be such a distance from ordinary obviously makes you a singular sort of person. And Michael certainly was that. Peerless, unlike any other, uncommon.

Michael was so distinctively “other.” He possessed qualities that very few others could lay claim to. Some qualities that few would wish for, but others that to some would seem blessed. He could move—and move others—like no other. He altered any room he was in. Which could not only make someone want to be in those rooms but perhaps also want to stay out.

One weekend, Billie and I were invited to Neverland, Michael’s ranch somewhere north of L.A. We weren’t invited by Michael, but by Arnie. Michael had loaned Arnie his house for the weekend so he could have people up there to celebrate his birthday. So it was Billie and myself and one of her five-year-old friends from school and Arnie and his lover, plus an assortment of Arnie’s overweight gay male buddies (called “bears” by the “community,” as it were). Arnie is a big man himself, and he likes to surround himself with other similarly fleshy bears of a feather.

So we gathered in Michael’s vast manicured acreage, on which was ensconced a neat cluster of guest houses, complete with their own little Neverland bars of soap, which I naturally coveted, stole, and then promptly lost. (How often I have thought of that soap, how I could have showed it off to friends, and maybe even have made a little Michael Jackson soap altar with a little spotlight shining on it in kind of a solemn circle causing the soap to alternately shine and glow.)

Who else could have the whole Disneyland train thing at the entrance of his humble home, not to mention the rides and the projection room with the candy shop and the pizza parlor? Can you even conceive of being able to have all these things? How much does constructing an empire like that widen the gap between you and everyone else? How many other private zoo and amusement park owners can you commiserate with about what it’s like when the roller coaster breaks down? “What a hassle, right? Who do you use for that? ’Cause I can’t find anyone! And how’s your gorilla doing? Did you take him to that groomer I recommended? It’s really hard to find a good gorilla groomer nowadays, you know? Did you find a new pilot for your G5? I’ll have my assistant call yours with the name of this great guy who flew Geffen’s jet for a while…”

And on and on and on, placing yourself beyond the reach of any and all ordinary discourse. Of course, you don’t have to only talk to people in your tax bracket. You can be with people with far less income, but you might find yourself apologizing for the disparity, you know? I know, how sad, right? You have so much money that your social options become more limited.

Anyway, Michael’s social options were severely restricted. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. He kind of stood apart from everything and everyone, pulling whatever focus was available, and waiting to see what would happen, who would gather, and how it would be. The exceptions were his children. He made himself a trio of companions to share his unique space, so distant from the ordinarily inhabited realms.

Michael and I both had childhoods that were, by most standards, decidedly unusual. How many children start performing at such a young age? (He was six, I a relatively more reasonable thirteen.) How many children perform for actual audiences to begin with? For that matter, how many people of any age ever perform for actual audiences?

Michael was famous long before he could even dimly understand what being adult meant. He was probably “someone” to other people long before he knew who he was to himself. At least I had arrived at the complex stage of puberty outside the hungry glare of a spotlight. But Michael… well, Michael was a child doing an adult’s job. A job that set him apart from everyone else his age—or pretty much everyone else, period. Who were his peers? Who could he relate to? Who would not have to pretend not to be weirded out by his radioactive celebrity?

You know the term “starstruck”? An odd term, no? And of course it can only happen to people who aren’t stars. The starstruck are thrown off—impacted by celebrity in a way that they find difficult to recover from, at least in the immediate time frame. I think that maybe one of the reasons that Michael could trust me—to the degree that he was able to trust anyone—is that I was immune to celebrity’s charms. Repeated exposure to anything renders it increasingly ordinary. The same especially holds true for what might otherwise (or initially) be considered extraordinary. Sort of like “too much of a good thing.” The charm wears off, the bloom shakes off the rose, and it’s midnight at Cinderella’s ball.