The many faces of Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson's 1996 tour was an exercise in extravagance. Photo / Alan Gibson

Michael Jackson was perhaps the most interesting human being on the planet. But which planet?

Addressing a biographer in 1995, he issued a taunt that might have been a confession: "Just tell people I'm an alien from Mars."

And - given Jacko's tinkering with his body and his migrations between gender and race - exactly how human was he? In his childhood, as the freakily talented leader of the Jackson Five, he was often described as a 45-year-old dwarf.

In the final images of Jackson, the 50-year-old looked more like a decaying infant, who spoke in a pre-pubescent whisper while concealing the evidence of time's assault behind an assortment of surgical masks, coy Islamic veils, and Jackie O-sized dark glasses, with a black umbrella to protect his improbably pallid skin from the sun.

Jackson was a biological conundrum. For a while it seemed he might be what Darwinian science called the missing link. He existed halfway between ape and angel, tenuously attaching us to our primitive origins while evolving towards a post-human future.

His best buddy in the 90s was Bubbles the diapered chimp, who slept in a crib in his bedroom. But he also smoochily bonded with a mascot who seemed like a preview of a future when our sordid internal organs will be replaced by electronic gadgetry.

Recording a song for a spin-off from Spielberg's E.T., he cosied up to the gnomic robot: "I kissed him before I left. Next day I missed him".

One of his concerts in the 1980s concluded with a rocket launch, which made it look as if Jackson were being propelled out of the arena in a burst of pyrotechnics. Fired upwards into the night sky, he was, like E.T., headed home; the moonwalker belongs in outer space, unencumbered by the gravity that tethers the rest of us.

In his Thriller video, directed by John Landis, he regressed to a werewolf, a fiend in a red leather biker jacket. But this ravening beast also saw himself, in other moods, as a heaven-sent evangelist. After Thriller he appeared in Captain Eo, a film Coppola directed for the custom-built cinemas at Disney's theme parks.

Here Jackson was in charge of a spaceship whose crew included a two-headed navigator, a pair of cybernauts and a shipmate with an elephant's trunk; clad in shining white like a Tennysonian knight of the Grail, he had a mission to disseminate peace.

How could you play both a fanged demon marauding through the jungle and a saviour descended from the starry heights without puzzling over who or what you really are?

Estranged from his venal, feuding family, in reclusive retreat from his predatory fans, Jackson lived from an early age with a sense of his own peculiarity. He was bewildered by what he calls "normal people"; he once said he preferred the audioanimatronic puppets in his amusement park at Neverland to "real people" because they didn't grab at his clothes or pester him for autographs.

His performance as the scarecrow in Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, released in 1978, touchingly conveyed this separateness. He hung from a wooden cross and whimpered as the beaked crows pestered him.

Eased to the ground, he flopped around in legless incompetence. Though his dancing was instinctive, he had difficulty learning how to walk. In the witch's sweatshop he is briskly dismembered, his straw-stuffed limbs hurled around the room.

(Jackson knew what this might feel like. When he and his brothers arrived at London-Heathrow airport in 1972 they were set upon by teenyboppers, who tore clumps of hair from Jermaine's scalp, robbed Michael of a shoe and almost choked him by tugging the opposite ends of his scarf.)

The scarecrow's makeup was a nasty parody: Jackson sported a bulbous plastic nose, a reminder of the feature that his brothers so cruelly teased him about. But the camouflage both concealed and revealed who he was, and he often travelled home from the studio wearing the scarecrow's outsize nose and his bristly wig of steel wool.

Peter Pan, another Jackson alter-ego, shares this quandary: are immortality and the freedom of the air really preferable to the grounded comforts of mortal life?

Stranded inside a redesigned body, Jackson has never been sure what species he belongs to. Hence his affinity with John Merrick the Elephant Man, whose skeleton he apparently attempted to buy in 1987 from the medical college where it is held.

Doctors attribute Merrick's deformity to Proteus syndrome, a malfunction in cell growth that causes bones to armour the body in grotesque lumps and flesh to sag in spongy polyp-like protrusions. Proteus was the shape-changing god, able to revise his form at will.

With his nose jobs and the self-hating diet that has left him weighing less than nine stone, Jackson stopped his own body from rebelling against him as Merrick's did.

Before he died, Jackson was a celebrity derisively celebrated for his quirks and crazes, for his health problems, financial crises and legal embarrassments.

It's worth recalling why the fuss started, so many decades ago. Back then he was a great performer, a virtuoso possessing skills that seemed almost supernatural, and at his frenetic best he illustrated what the Victorian psychologist Havelock Ellis meant when he said, "To dance is to imitate the gods".

A filmed memento of the 10-year-old boy's Motown audition in 1968 remains astonishing. As he sings James Brown's I Got the Feeling, he channels an erotic energy of which he can have had no knowledge; as he dances, he shimmies, swivels and backslides across the floor in a blur of independently operating limbs, triumphantly demonstrating that the human body can be an instrument, not just a dumb appliance.

His performance of Billie Jean at a Motown television reunion in 1983 is a kind of apotheosis. He moves in a blitz of static electricity, shaken from the spangles encrusting his socks, his jacket and his single glove.

One moment he mimics the plaintive open-handed gesticulation of a warbler in a minstrel show, next he jabs the air with high kicks like a martial-arts boxer.

The glottal hiccups of his vocal delivery, exploding into high-pitched spasms of delight, exactly match the jerks of his torso. This is less showbiz than a voodoo rite, executed by a demented dervish.

He begins Billie Jean with a series of pelvic thrusts, and his right hand spends most of the time clutching his crotch or investigatively groping in his trouser pocket. Although the choreography is blatantly sexual, it's impossible to imagine Jackson dancing with a partner.

He is auto-erotic, and in Billie Jean the male and female halves of his persona - the arrogant sidewalk rowdy who rakes an imaginary comb through his sleek hair, and the glittering, girlish dandy who twirls on tiptoe like a ballerina - perform a duet, announcing their fusion in those ecstatic throaty gulps.

Fred Astaire remarked with acute insight that Jackson was "an angry dancer". But angry at what?

Perhaps at the fans who challenged his autonomy by wanting to mate with him: the song repudiates Billie Jean's claim that he has fathered her baby. Its lyrics also vent anger against a world that traduces Jackson and, in his view, makes him a martyr.

"Be careful what you do," he warns with the upraised finger of a lecturer or a holier-than-thou preacher, "because a lie becomes the truth."

In this respect he ought to be the object of his own anger, since many of the fictions he later so bitterly denounced - for instance the claim that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber because this would help him to live to be 150 - began as stories he invented or licensed his publicists to spread.

Jackson has acknowledged that for him truth is slippery and relativistic. A lie told about his image, he once said, "wasn't a lie, it was public relations".

Where does that leave the indignant assertions in his 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey, when he swore that he didn't bleach his skin, or in the 1994 television broadcast he made to rebut accusations of child abuse and protest his "complete innocence"?

After all, these were exercises in public relations, attempts to repair a soiled image.

By then Jackson could not tell the difference between truth and wishful thinking. Fame and wealth had turned him into an exorbitant American romantic, a dreamer who, like Gatsby or Citizen Kane, used money to make fantasies materialise before his eyes.

JM Barrie imagined Neverland, the resort where Peter Pan sheltered his lost boys; Jackson actually constructed it, with carousels and rollercoasters, giraffes and pythons, free sweets in the cinema and recessed hospital beds so that terminally ill children could watch Disney films while remaining hooked to their intravenous tubes.

When Jordy Chandler's family brought their charges against him, Jackson was incredulous.

"I can't believe this is happening to me, Michael Jackson," he said, viewing himself as a third person. Lashings of cash had always bought him love: during his interview with Oprah, Elizabeth Taylor strolled on to sing his praises, and later received a diamond necklace. Now the expenditure of a few million dollars kept vexatious reality at bay, persuading the Chandlers to withdraw their case.

Despite this outcome, and despite the victory sign he gave to his fans outside the courthouse during his trial for abusing Gavin Arvizo in 2005, Jackson was effectively destroyed by these scandals.

His downfall came when the police, investigating Jordy's reports of genital blotches, photographed his private parts.

He called the ordeal "humiliating" and "dehumanising"; in fact the examination humanised him, humbling him by unpeeling illusions and reducing him to parity with the rest of us - odd, imperfect, but miserably unmysterious, with mottled testicles, patchily discoloured buttocks, wispy pubic hair, and a peekaboo penis that was possibly (the forensic observers disagreed) circumcised. Jackson forfeited his divinity at that moment.

Yet this was when, in a bid for rehabilitation, he began to deify himself all over again as a healer and redeemer.

In Beat It he had averted war between two street gangs by coaxing them to dance not fight; empowered by the video, he assumed he had a duty to pacify and purify the world.

"We're healing LA right now," he told Oprah, "we've already done Sarajevo." Jackson always treated his concerts as rehearsals for the second coming: on his 1984 tour a voice from the echoing beyond inaugurated the revels by ordering the resurrection of the dead - "Arise, all the world, and behold the kingdom".

The kingdom that was coming turned out to be a Disneyfied kindergarten. "I try to imitate Jesus," Jackson said as Oprah reverently nodded. He added: "I'm not saying I am Jesus", inserting a brief pause for protests by his apostles. "But I try to follow his teaching - to be like the children."

Being like them, as Jackson explained to Martin Bashir in 2003, meant sharing a chaste bed with them. It also entailed begetting children of his own, presumably bypassing the conventionally messy route.

"I have been blessed beyond comprehension," said Jackson after taking delivery of his first child, roughly paraphrasing the Virgin Mary's line when the angel announced that the Holy Ghost had rented her womb. Wanting sole credit for the miracle, he spirited Prince Michael out of the hospital five hours after the infant emerged from the body of Debbie Rowe, the dermatological nurse to whom he entrusted his seed.

He was so keen to make off with his daughter Paris, born in 1998, that he hurtled away with her before the placenta was wiped off.

Once he had been content to imitate Christ; now, as a parent, he felt entitled to behave like God the Father. In 2002 he dangled his third child, Prince Michael II, from a third-floor hotel balcony in Berlin. It looked as if he was about to sacrifice the struggling bundle, offering it as a morsel to be gobbled up by the voracious fans down below.

In 1987 he wrote a letter to People magazine complaining about his mistreatment by the tabloids. Its conclusion could be the unspoken soliloquy of Christ writhing on the cross: "I must endure for the power I was sent forth by, for the world, for the children. But have mercy, for I've been bleeding for a long time now."

At the press conference earlier this year to promote his London concerts, the few words Jackson consented to utter were chosen with care.

"This is it," he said, "this is really it, this is the final curtain call."

- OBSERVER