Who's Bad?

By RICHARD CORLISS

HE CALLS HIS RANCH NEVERLAND. HE surrounds himself with young boys. He speaks in a child's whisper. He seems to float onstage. And he doesn't want to grow up. Michael Jackson has identified so closely with Peter Pan that for years he hoped to star in a Steven Spielberg film version of the James M. Barrie play. It might have been the first extraterrestrial autobiography.

Yet Jackson's profound weirdness -- not just the glove or the seaweed hair striping his face but the blanched skin, the pained eyes, the tremulous soul -- hinted that Pan was the wrong role for him. Wasn't Jackson really one of the Lost Boys, stranded between childhood and adolescence, loved by the public yet feeling caged and abandoned, and searching, groping for the Edenic innocence he believed was any child's birthright?

Allegations made public last week raised new questions: What humanity may Michael Jackson have lost? What innocence might he have stolen from children dazzled by his aura? In a vitriolic custody battle between a Los Angeles woman and her ex-husband, who is a prominent dentist and (it goes without saying) screenwriter, the pair's 13-year-old child had accused Jackson of fellating him, and the Los Angeles Police Department was investigating the charge. The star, who has poignantly described himself as a victim of child abuse, was in danger of being exposed as a perpetrator.

"I am confident the department will conduct a fair and thorough investigation," Jackson said in a statement, "and its results will demonstrate that there was no wrongdoing on my part." His attorney, Howard Weitzman, denied the charge and accused the father of extortion. "What has transpired here," he says, "is the result of a rejected demand made by a father of one of Michael's young friends." The dentist, Jackson's camp alleged, had proposed a $20 million production partnership with the star and had added this threat: Put up the money or I'll tell the cops you abused my boy. The father has reportedly denied this.

In Bangkok on his Pepsi-sponsored world tour, Jackson canceled two concerts, pleading dehydration, but returned Friday night to wow more than 40,000 fans in the sweltering heat. (In Thai papers, Pepsi's rival placed ads that read, "Dehydrated? There's Always Coke.") As gossips fanned stories of a Michael suicide attempt that were denied by his lawyer, sister Janet and famous friend Elizabeth Taylor jetted to Singapore, the tour's next stop, to give moral support. The Los Angeles police had already searched Jackson's Santa Ynez ranch for lurid videotapes; one report said nothing incriminating was found. The police were questioning other lads, supposedly including child star Macaulay Culkin. And when will results be issued? "It could be tomorrow, it could be two months from now," said L.A.P.D. spokesman Arthur Holmes. "We solve no crime before its time." This is Hollywood, folks; everyone speaks Show Biz.

And show biz is a part of every scandal. No sexual crime is so disturbing, no career blackmail so heinous, that it cannot be turned into career opportunities and comic mulch. Jackson had not been charged with so much as laying a glove on the boy, yet respected network news divisions were vying with tabloid TV to get the hot skinny. On CBS, This Morning co-anchor Paula Zahn interviewed a "reporter" for the sleaze show Hard Copy. In Britain the rumor rags were resplendent: sicko jacko, cried Thursday's Daily Star ("The Newspaper That Cares"); wacko jacko screamed the Sun. In the U.S. the baiting was a bit more genial. "Suddenly," Howard Stern told his nationwide radio audience, "Pee-wee Herman is an upright citizen." And Jay Leno on the Tonight Show noted, "Someone said when you hear the name Michael Jackson it epitomizes all that's kind and good. So did the name Heidi until a month ago."

In Los Angeles, a company town still cringing from the Heidi Ho' headlines about a Hollywood madam and her yet to be revealed list of star and mogul clients, scandal is a commodity to be both feared and savored. In the rest of the country, the Heidi story was rancid catnip for a slow news summer. But the Michael Jackson story goes deeper -- yes, and deeper than the sad public frolics of Woody Allen a year ago. For as pitiable and lunatic as Jackson's soft eccentricities make him appear in the skeptical public eye, he had surely convinced the world of his devotion to children and his empathy with them. It was as if, deprived of a normal childhood, he wanted to create a paranormal one in his Neverland lab. Bring on the children.

"I love being around them," he wrote in his 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk. "There always seem to be a bunch of kids over at the house, and they're always welcome. They energize me -- just being around them." When he welcomed handicapped kids to the ranch, he was no condescending Lord Bountiful looking for a tax write-off; he was their peer, and they were friends he could play with, sing to -- in the purest sense of the word, love.

AND SLEEP WITH. EVEN BRETT BARNES, an 11-year-old Australian boy who spoke in Jackson's defense, said the star shared a bed, with him. "I was on one side of the bed, and he was on the other," he told KNBC-TV. "It was a big bed." In his TV interview with Oprah Winfrey last February, when asked what he missed in his own childhood, Jackson said, "Slumber parties." He had them with the 13-year-old who made the allegations; indeed, Jackson traveled to Monte Carlo and Walt Disney World with that boy, his half-sister and his mother and, according to the complaint, slept with the boy. Reports indicate that the boy told his therapist that in Monaco Jackson had told him masturbation was "a wonderful thing," lured him into a bathtub and performed oral sex on him, then told him he would be sent to juvenile hall if the extent of the relationship were revealed.

Maybe Jackson is, emotionally, a preteen, getting his wish of an intimate slumber party. His behavior onstage suggests as much: the infamous crotch- grabbing seems as spontaneous as an infant investigating itself. But he is also an adult, 35 this week, and any boy's mother might foresee problems of propriety in letting a man bunk with her boy. Then again, the rich are different, and these are rich, nearly famous people. The mother's second husband is a rental-car magnate. The father is co-author of the script for one of the summer's sillier comedies, and supposedly the idea for the film was suggested by the boy himself. In one aspect, though, this brood is like many other postnuclear families: last week a judge ordered the father to pay $68,804 in overdue child support.

The allegations also speak to the modern preoccupation with child abuse. In an age when lurid lyrics, sniggering sitcoms and trash-talking stars work hard to rob children of innocence, the sexually abusive parent, guardian or family friend is not only a predator in his own right but also a stand-in for all the gaudy malevolence of pop culture. "There's a social hysteria about child abuse," says Professor Melvin Guyer, a psychologist and lawyer who teaches at the University of Michigan. "It began with the McMartin Pre-School case and continued with Woody Allen. There has been a feeding frenzy, in which the ordinary presumptions of innocence are not applied. The allegations are treated as evidence." And the public reacts with wide eyes and a bit of drool at the corner of the mouth. "The public gets to be puritanical and voyeuristic at the same time. Their attitude is basically, 'This food is terrible, and there's not enough of it.' "

In custody cases, charges of child abuse can be the useful tool of a vindictive parent. "A contested custody battle provides fertile soil for false allegations of sexual abuses," says Guyer. "There are therapists who interview children in ways that are leading, suggestive and coercive; they are the validators of sexual abuse charges." The charges in the Jackson case smell fishy to Lynne Gold-Bikin, a Philadelphia family lawyer and chairwoman- elect of the family-law section of the American Bar Association. "You're looking at a 13-year-old child in the middle of a bitter custody fight," she says. "These children are the least reliable witnesses of all, because they're being torn between pleasing two parents. They're trying to protect themselves. Often children side with one parent or the other and say what that parent wants to hear."

Stephen Ceci, professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University, says abuse accusations in custody cases appear to be less prevalent now than they were five years ago. Moreover, a 13-year-old is less likely to be coerced into imagining abuse than a pre-schooler is. Still, Ceci cautions, "there is no Pinocchio test. The child's nose doesn't grow longer when he tells you something that is factually untrue." Absent physical evidence -- bruises, photographs -- only the adult and, perhaps, the child know if the charge is true.

Other motives are often at work when the prospective defendant is a star. "You get a peculiar asymmetry on matters of reputation," says Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School. "The strong are subject to the depredations of the weak, but they cannot effectively retaliate in kind. That's one of the problems of being rich and famous." Another problem, Epstein says, is that "many celebrities start to think that ordinary rules don't apply to them. A likelihood of serious misconduct may rise."

SO FAR, THE JACKSON CASE IS A TANgle of maybes, omigods and say-it- ain't-so's. Both the star and the boy are figures who cry out to be believed. An edgy Hollywood has not rushed to Jackson's defense. Though Sony, with which he has a multizillion-dollar movie and music deal, and Pepsi have offered tepid support, many of Jackson's closest colleagues were conveniently on vacation when they might have spoken up for him. His unauthorized biographer will testify, however. "I believe all these charges will be found to be ludicrous," says J. Randy Taraborrelli (Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness). "I've seen so many extortion attempts against the Jackson camp, and they never turn out to be worth anything." While researching his book, Taraborrelli says, "every damn butler, housekeeper, chauffeur and chef wanted $100,000 for their insights into his private life. I've written about Diana Ross, Cher, Carol Burnett and Roseanne Arnold, but I never had that experience with any of my other books. And that was just me, a biographer. You can imagine what it's like for him with his millions."

No one is so vulnerable as a superstar -- except, possibly, a young boy who worships the star and wants to be near him at any moral cost. Both could be scarred for life. The wounds of abused children have been well documented; so have the welts of performers caught fooling around unbecomingly in the klieg light of publicity. Paul Reubens jettisoned his career as gooney kid Pee-wee Herman when he was caught masturbating in a Sarasota, Florida, theater. After Woody Allen jilted Mia Farrow for Farrow's adopted daughter, he found his reputation as a world-class filmmaker carrying the asterisk of a smirk.

Could the same fate befall Michael Jackson? "Woody Allen was Humpty Dumpty," says Guyer, "and now Michael Jackson is. They won't be put back together again. Whenever Michael Jackson pats a child's head, it will be looked at in a different way. This is reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. But we're a global village now, and the whole world is watching."

The children are watching, Michael. They want to believe that you'd never hurt them -- that you are their best, sweetest, secret friend.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York