Michael Jackson: Behind the mask

He may have been trying to prove that he is a just a fond father when he dangled his nine-month-old son over a 50ft balcony last week, but his critics thought otherwise. Why is the former King of Pop so determined to crash-land his way into the headlines?

The last decade of Michael Jackson's life has hardly been the most glorious phase of his career, but the events of the last six months have seen him slide downwards at unprecedented speed. His visit to Berlin this week – during which he dangled his baby son from his hotel balcony, before taking his two elder children to the zoo with their heads wrapped in veils – follows a run of tragi-comic mishaps and controversy; if Jackson was ever the "King of Pop", there seems little doubt that his crown has now been broken into small pieces.

In June, he appeared on a platform in Harlem with the Reverend Al Sharpton to declare his support for black performers who had experienced the rough end of the US music business. Still reeling from the poor performance of his unfortunately titled 2001 album Invincible, Jackson took the opportunity to describe Tommy Mottola, the boss of Sony, his record company, as "mean", "a racist" and "very devilish". Even the notoriously verbose Sharpton was taken aback: the reverend described Jackson's comments as "unfair and unfounded", while an array of American artists – including Jennifer Lopez and Destiny's Child – came to Mottola's defence.

Two months later, Jackson appeared at the MTV Awards in New York – where, in celebration of his 44th birthday, he was invited on to the stage and handed a small statuette and a cake by Britney Spears. She paid tribute to Jackson as "the artist of the millennium". Jackson assumed that he was being handed the greatest accolade of his career, and made the requisite speech. "When I was a little boy in Indiana, if someone had told me I would be getting the Artist of the Millennium Award, I wouldn't have believed it," he said. MTV quickly announced that Jackson was mistaken; the channel had merely wanted to wish him many happy returns.

To cap it all, earlier this month he appeared at the Santa Barbara County Court, to testify in a case brought against him by a German promoter. Jackson denied pulling out of a deal that would have seen him performing in Australia and Hawaii on New Year's Eve 1999, but told the court that he could cast little light on his financial affairs, on account of the fact that he was a "visionary".

The main event, however, was the moment that the judge ordered Jackson to remove his trademark surgical mask. Though his apparently ravaged appearance hardly represented much of a surprise, the image of his face in such up-close detail – scarred lips, a nose seemingly held together by Elastoplast – was inevitably the focus of frenzied comment. Underlying many reports was the idea that the mere mortal long buried under his reshaped figure was now straining to be seen, and the results were as horrific as this borderline sci-fi scenario implied.

A week later came the baby-dangling brouhaha. As is usually the case when Jackson crash-lands in the headlines, his small cabal of celebrity friends loudly came to his aid. "The word dangling is what I would like to look into," said Liza Minnelli. "I don't see a picture where he is dangling the child dangerously, I see him holding him up above a railing for the press to say hello to his kid."

Quite apart from the rights and wrongs of the hotel balcony incident, the mire of oddness surrounding the birth of Jackson's second son speaks volumes about the strange universe in which his father resides. The existence of the child, named Prince Michael II, only came to light when Jackson introduced him to the magicians Siegfried and Roy after one of their shows in Las Vegas. The identity of the boy's mother looks set to remain unclear: whispers point to Debbie Rowe, briefly Jackson's wife, and the mother of Prince Michael Junior (5) and Paris Michael Katherine (4), although Jackson refuses to comment.

It is customary to see Jackson as a fallen genius: even those who loudly guffaw at his recent travails will pay tribute to the extraordinary talent that created his two masterpieces, 1979's Off the Wall, and the huge-selling Thriller, released three years later. Those who have followed his progress closely, however, claim that the reality is much more ambiguous. "Everything about Michael Jackson's career has been so managed and produced that it's really hard to tell where his collaborators end and where he begins," says the American writer and soul expert Ben Edmonds, who recently penned a Jackson cover story for Mojo magazine. "The Jackson Five records were the product of the Motown machine: they were the label's last great assembly line triumph. And with his best solo records, Thriller and Off The Wall, you don't really know how much of it is Michael and how much is Quincy Jones, the producer. He's an amazing singer and performer, and a fairly decent songwriter – but you always have to wonder about the role of the brain trusts that have been created around him. You just don't know."

Edmonds' analysis points to a pattern underlying Jackson's decline. He left Motown at the end of the Seventies, and ditched Quincy Jones in the late Eighties. His spat with Tommy Mottola proves that he now sees little use for the protective cordon provided by the Sony Corporation. But the smaller the number of his associates, the more exposed he seems; and the more his problems seem to multiply. Since the child abuse allegations against him were settled out of court in 1993, the quality of his music has plummeted: these days, his sole bulwark against a prurient and hostile media is his own flimsy celebrity.

"We don't see him as a human being," says Edmonds, "but he might not see himself that way either. He may be like Andy Warhol: a completely empty vessel apart from his own fame. We just don't know, because we're never allowed to see beyond that surgically altered façade."

Of course, Jackson's celebrity associates – Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, the ever-effusive Uri Geller – can always be relied upon to sketch out a picture of glowing good health, cosmic spirituality, and touchingly workaday interests. Geller first met Jackson in 2000, when he was introduced to him at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel. "His bodyguard phoned ahead to let him know I was on my way up," he says, "but when I knocked on his door, nobody stirred. It was ajar. Thousands of photographs, toys and little treasures, all of them gifts from fans, were scattered around the suite. Life-size Star Wars cut-outs stood guard. When he walked out of his bedroom, with his hair pulled back and his skin clean of make-up, my heart lurched. I had been prepared for facial scars, even deformity. In fact, his face is strong and serene, and his skin is beautiful – shining. He glows with an aura of energy."

Geller even claims that Jackson has a healthy interest in that embodiment of normality, the English Premiership. "He's not into sport much," he says, "though he's very fit, and he supports Fulham – in the casual way that a lot of teenagers say they support Manchester United, not really understanding the rules, but happy to relate to the team." So that's that, then: baby-dangling, paranoia, hubris and bizarre appearance apart, Michael Jackson is actually a pretty normal guy. Got that?