At last, Michael Jackson is at rest.
Only he isn’t, really.
When the Jackson family buried their most famous brother and son on Thursday night within Forest Lawn Memorial Park’s Great Mausoleum few believed that it would be an eternal arrangement.
This is Los Angeles after all: a city in which a widow recently tried to auction her husband’s crypt, directly above Marilyn Monroe’s resting place, on eBay for $4.6 million (£2.8 million) to pay off the mortgage on her Beverly Hills home.
The advertisement on eBay described the offer as a “once in a lifetime and into eternity opportunity”.
Advertisement
In this part of the world nothing is permanent if the price is right. And the unavoidable fact is that Jackson’s tomb will be lucrative for whoever controls access to it — hence the reason, we can safely assume, that it took more than two months to put him in the ground.
Just look at Elvis Presley’s tomb at Graceland: it helped to generate $55 million (£34 million) in income for the singer’s estate last year. Will Forest Lawn be as good to the Jacksons as Graceland has been to the Presleys?
Even with a million visitors a year before Jackson’s gold-plated coffin arrived at the mausoleum, which contains the likes of Walt Disney and Clark Gable, it seems unlikely unless some kind of Jackson-themed memorabilia emporium is opened.
At present there is only a Forest Lawn Museum Store, which “offers items for purchase that will remind you of the beautiful things you enjoyed seeing during your visit”, and, of course, a flower shop, open every day from 8am until 5pm. There is no charge for general admission.
Carrying Jackson’s remains to Neverland and turning it into a theme park would clearly have been a more profitable way to exploit his death.
Advertisement
It would have horrified the singer, however, who associated the ranch with his child abuse trial in 2005 and never wanted to return.
It is to the credit of Jackson’s mother, Katherine, that she over-ruled that proposal, in spite of pressure — and a PR campaign — from the singer’s brother, Jermaine.
But, of course, in a town such as Los Angeles and to a family so heavily steeped in showbusiness, publicity can be even more valuable than cash. There was a clear sense last night that the Jacksons were finally beginning to push their luck in that regard.
This was Michael Jackson’s third funeral. An initial private ceremony took place at Forest Lawn’s Hollywood Hills facility in July, a few hours before the memorial service at the Staples Centre in downtown Los Angeles.
Of course, Thursday’s burial was billed as private but, in reality, it was nothing of the sort.
Advertisement
Most of the event was covered by a live video feed and when the cameras went black as the service began it did not feel so much like a gesture of privacy as a teaser for the Jackson brothers’ reality show (to be broadcast on the A&E channel with the working title Jackson Family Dynasty).
While no one would question the Jackson brothers’ grief, the death of their more famous, more successful sibling has, undoubtedly, given them new careers. There were other jarring elements to the burial. Like the hour-plus delay before the event got under way, during which guests such as the Rev Al Sharpton twittered on their mobile phones. Like the TV camera lighting that made you wonder how much of it would be packaged and sold at a later date.
And like the 200-plus celebrity guest list, including Macaulay Culkin, Stevie Wonder, Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Barry Bonds, that made it feel more like Memorial Service: The Sequel than a family gathering.
Alas, a threequel probably isn’t entirely out of the question, either.