"I'm just like anyone," Michael Jackson once famously said. "I cut and bleed. And I embarrass easily." It was one of the singer's numerous attempts to suggest that he was, deep down, an ordinary person – and it was as unconvincing as all the others.
For some, the King of Pop was an object of hysterical devotion; for many more his name became a synonym for weirdness, or for something more sinister. But on one point, at least, they could all agree: being "just like anyone" had little to do with it.
His death last night, from a heart attack, brought a sudden end to a life that would have been noteworthy for any one of the things he came to be famous for: his early child stardom, his dominance of 1980s popular music, the disorienting transformation of his face, surreal tales of oxygen tanks and chimpanzees, his personal amusement park, or the child-abuse allegations and financial crises that came to overshadow his last decade.
He was famous before any child could reasonably be expected to know what fame was. Born in 1958 in the working-class town of Gary, Indiana, he was performing with his brothers in the Jackson 5 by the age of six, and soon emerged as the group's lead vocalist. His irrepressible on-stage energy, though, was motivated by fear: he later said that his father, Joe Jackson, a frustrated guitarist, beat him and his brothers frequently and loomed over rehearsals with a belt in his hand.
As a Motown group with a string of hits, the Jackson 5 broke records in their own right, but Jackson's stratospheric success left them in the dust. His album Thriller, released in 1982 – featuring hits such as Beat It and Billie Jean – remains the biggest-selling album of all time, with sales of more than 100m copies. By 1984, he was receiving an award from Ronald Reagan at the White House for philanthropic work in the fields of alcoholism and drug abuse; the next year, he co-wrote the charity single We Are The World.
But by then, the celebrity that he had seemed to embrace so naturally seemed to begin to undo him, and his childlike persona gave way to something more strange. The story of sleeping in an oxygen tank may have been untrue – Jackson reportedly helped to spread it for publicity purposes, like the one about trying to buy the bones of the Elephant Man – but he really did adopt a chimpanzee, Bubbles, as a pet. And his skin began to grow lighter, a phenomenon attributed to a medical condition, though repeated plastic surgery drew much notice.
His career did not tumble rapidly earthwards: 1987's Bad sold hugely. But Jackson had left the building; Wacko Jacko had arrived.
He was first accused of child molestation in 1993 by Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old with whose family the singer subsequently reached a settlement. A year later, he married Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis's daughter; they divorced not long after and in 1996 he married Debbie Rowe, a nurse with whom he had two children, Prince and Paris. His third child, Blanket – born in 2002, the mother's identity still unknown – he notoriously dangled over a balcony in Berlin in 2002, as fans below looked on alarmed.
By 2003, Jackson's musical career was effectively petering out, though, as with all things in his life, his failure was not like other people's. His 2001 album Invincible, a comparative failure alongside his other work, still sold 10m copies worldwide. But after more than 30 years in the industry, the questions about his eccentric lifestyle were becoming more persistent.
In 2002, the British reporter Martin Bashir persuaded the star to offer unprecedented access for a Granada TV documentary. The film, broadcast the following year, showed the star spending vast amounts of money and revealed for the first time the full, unnerving creepiness of his Neverland mansion set-up, where he admitted that disadvantaged children asked to the ranch were invited to share his bedroom.
More disturbingly, the film showed Jackson holding hands with a 13-year-old boy called Gavin Arvizo, whom he had befriended after the child was diagnosed with cancer. Shortly after the documentary was broadcast, Jackson was arrested and charged with "lewd and lascivious acts" against the boy.
It was a very different Jackson who appeared in court in January 2005 to the untouchable star who had seen off Jordan Chandler's accusations a decade earlier. The singer made a stab at defiance, climbing on top of a car in front of crowds of fans and insisting on his innocence, but cut a pathetic figure, addicted to morphine and the painkiller Demerol and weighing only eight and a half stone.
For the next 14 weeks the California courthouse became, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, the "intersection between the weird and the weirder", in which the jury were told of pornography found at Jackson's Neverland mansion which he had allegedly used in "grooming" young boys, and of the alcohol which he called "Jesus juice" and encouraged them to drink. Jackson argued that his relationships had been entirely innocent, and thanks to a formidable defence team, he was acquitted on 14 June 2005.
Like OJ Simpson, however, he would never shake off the burden of suspicion, and the trial marked the moment at which his always unsettling brand of celebrity finally soured. It was clear, too, that mounting such an "A" list defence had all but cleared out a fortune vastly diminished by years of crazed extravagance.
The star never again lived at Neverland, moving to Bahrain with his children after the trial as a guest of Sheikh Abdullah, who had paid him millions to record material written by the sheikh. In 2006, in a further ignominy, Jackson was forced to close the ranch to save money, and his personal belongings – including the gates of Neverland – were later auctioned off in an ignominious fire sale.
The last years of his life, as he passed the age of 50, were marked by further financial and personal humiliations, and by markedly declining health. He was sued by the sheikh for $7m in unpaid loans, and later by the film maker John Landis, director of the Thriller video which had catapulted Jackson to stratospheric levels of celebrity in 1982, for failing to hand over profits. At least 45 other lawsuits, mostly for unpaid bills, were brought against him. Even his enormous song back catalogue, including the entire Lennon-McCartney back catalogue, could not save him, thanks to a $270m loan he had taken out against it.
He was reported to have a critical lung condition and need a transplant, and his rare public appearances became more infrequent and more pitiable.
Broke and broken, but still owing vast sums, Jackson could not afford to stop working, however. It was announced that he would play a 50 dates at the O2 arena in London beginning in two week's time – an astonishing number of shows that promised to net him a rumoured $50m-$100m if he could finish the set. Jackson, it was reported, had wanted to perform no more than 10 dates, but with another looming multimillion-dollar court case for allegedly reneging on a deal to perform in the US, he could not afford to do otherwise.
Rumours of his frailty and the very short periods of time for which he could perform for a time, even of the possible use of lookalikes on stage, did nothing to quell demand for tickets though, and 800,000 sold out in five hours. His promoters insisted he retained the constitution of a man half his age: "I would trade my body for his tomorrow, he's in fantastic shape," said AEG Live's president, Randy Phillips. The decision to postpone some of the dates, they insisted, were nothing to do with Jackson's health. There was talk of a three-year, rolling global tour, culminating in the US in 2011. The King of Pop would be back to claim his throne.
After a life that could never have been scripted, and a level of success that the pop world, arguably, has never before seen, Jackson's death, when it came, was as banal as it was shocking.
If there was a time when he had seemed other than human – a man whose celebrity transcended the normal rules of humanity – he was, when he died, a broken and tragically mortal man.
"If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same", he once said, "then everything that happens in between can be dealt with."
He had more to deal with than most.