Dear Gossips,
I’m reading a book right now called Remember The Time: Protecting Michael Jackson In His Final Days by Bill Whitfield, Javon Beard, and Tanner Colby. Whitfield and Beard were MJ’s bodyguards at the end. They were with him always. And the children too. And they saw everything.
This is not about the controversy. It’s not the salacious details about MJ’s life that make the story compelling. What’s compelling is the culture. The culture of protecting and indulging. The powerless observation. How contradictory, right? They are hired to look after him. To use brawn and aggression to take care of him against threats from the outside, when the greatest threat was happening inside. Celebrities are so afraid of what’s going on around them. They seem to never understand that what hurts them most is what’s killing them from within. That, too often, they are their own killers.
It’s required course material for the Faculty of Celebrity Studies.
Also on my Easter reading list:
Still making my way through Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music, Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, Abroad by Katie Crouch, and of course some New Adult smut, Samantha Young’s Out Of The Shallows, the sequel to Into The Deep.
And you?
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
