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THE INDEPENDENT
You've got a friend in meIt's billed as the most sensational trial since OJ Simpson's, but even if convicted of child abuse, one man will stand by Michael Jackson - Dr Firpo Carr. In LA, the Jackson family's 'spiritual advisor' explains how the star is the victim of a racist plot
By Robert Chalmers
11 July 2004
Even before I turned on the television news that morning and heard a private detective alleging that Michael Jackson's genitals have "a kind of tie-dyed appearance", I tell Dr Firpo Carr, I had been starting to wonder just quite how good a job he, Jackson's "spiritual adviser", had been doing. It's a minor detail in the context of a cuttings file that has included, within the same paragraph, terms like "12-year-old boy", "masturbation" and "fellatio"; and yet, taken as a whole, this is surely the kind of vocabulary that Carr, a lexicographer and man of God, is most eager to discourage.
"Well, the first thing I would say," the doctor replies, "is that, if you hear things through the media, be suspect about them."
"Like that magazine story about ritual cleansing in sheep's blood, and the quotations from voodoo death rites Michael Jackson supposedly commissioned in Switzerland in 2000?"
"Yes," says Carr.
"How did it go? 'David Geffen - be gone!' 'Steven Spielberg - be gone!'"
"Yes. Though that is not a pattern of behaviour I recognise," says Carr. "Michael has always had an eye for the unusual. Michael is a joker."
This year promises to be one of the least amusing of the singer's turbulent life. In January he was arraigned on 10 counts, including child molestation, administering an intoxicating agent to a minor, conspiracy to commit child abduction, false imprisonment and extortion. On 30 April he pleaded not guilty to all charges, each of which is punishable by three to eight years in prison. The case has uncomfortable echoes of the Jordie Chandler affair, settled out of court in January 1994. Jackson, who denied allegations that he had sexually molested Chandler when the boy was 13, paid $22m (£12m) to the child and his family. The singer is currently free, on $3m (£1.6m) bail. A trial date has been provisionally set for September.
Santa Barbara prosecutors have imposed a so-called "gagging order" aimed at suppressing details of the latest charges, which concern a boy of Hispanic origin, 12 at the time of the offences which allegedly occurred early last year at Neverland, Jackson's 2,700-acre ranch at Los Olivos, north of Los Angeles. The ruling seems, if anything, to have heightened the interest of the US media, though the Jackson family - notoriously uncoordinated under most circumstances - has closed ranks around its most famous member, seeking to pursue a strategy of dignified silence.
Dr Carr, meanwhile, has become a familiar figure on US news networks. Though he used to be introduced as Jackson's "spiritual adviser", he now prefers to be called a "family friend". A devout but controversial member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, the faith in which Jackson was raised, Carr has travelled to court with the singer's parents Joseph and Katherine, and is especially close to Michael's brother Randy (they shared a flat for a year in the mid-1990s) and eldest sister Rebbie, who first introduced him to the family, 10 years ago.
Diversity has been the keynote of Firpo Carr's career. "I've been called everything from a visionary, to a prophet, to a holy man," says Carr, a former computer engineer with IBM and systems analyst at the LAPD, and the author of books such as Are Gays Really 'Gay'? - a bold thesis whose chapter-headings include: "Benjamite Buggery" and "What Constitutes a Cure?" Earlier this year Firpo turned up in Bahrain wearing a thobe tunic, giving joint lectures on comparative religion with Michael Jackson's brother Jermaine, an orthodox Muslim.
I'd been dealing with Dr Carr via his office in LA - premises, he'd said, which were "not suitable" for a meeting. Instead he agreed to talk in my hotel room in West Hollywood.
I'd expected a soberly dressed zealot carrying a pile of Watchtowers (the Jehovah Witness's proselytising magazine) but Carr arrives in jeans, a loose-fitting Tahitian shirt and a Walkman. Firpo - who is 50, but looks 10 years younger - is bright, engaging, and good-humoured. As you might expect from a collector of historic dictionaries, there's a slight preciousness about his language - he's fond of phrases like "if you will", and prefers "refrain", or "cease" in places where, for most people, a simple "stop" would do.
How well does he know the notorious recluse?
Carr describes his contacts with Jackson as limited but intense, and "sufficient to be able to speak authoritatively on his character".
Their conversations began shortly after the star's arrest last year, he says. Then, at one private audience, in February: "Michael suddenly said: 'I love you.' And I said - because I felt I had to - 'I love you too.' And then, with what some people might think was arrogance, but which I interpret as innocence, Michael said: 'I love you more.' I was like - OK, Michael has spoken. When you are with Michael Jackson," Carr adds, "he is so spiritual.
"Michael," he recalls, "pointed at me, almost in anger. Then he said: 'You are the prophet.'"
As with the OJ Simpson trial, whose drama it threatens to eclipse, the Michael Jackson case seems likely to throw up a cast of captivating minor characters. Carr, who already gets hailed by strangers, is well-placed to become Jackson's Kato Kaelin.
Carr admits that certain sections of the US media, notably talk radio, don't take him seriously. It could be to do with his first name (inspired by "The Wild Bull of the Pampas", Argentinian heavyweight Luis Firpo) which is more A Night at the Opera than Twelve Angry Men. There's also a tendency for Jackson's incrementally bizarre behaviour (whether he's dangling his baby over a balcony, leaping on the bonnet of an SUV outside the courthouse, or boasting about taking his new-born daughter home in a towel, with her placenta) to undermine not just his own credibility, but that of his apologists. This is especially true of Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor who - with each successive crisis, and cosmetic operation - become increasingly ardent in their mutual support, and less and less easy to tell apart. One US satirist has a routine in which Firpo Carr explains that Jackson once considered a face transplant, but pulled out after Liza Minnelli, his preferred donor, withheld consent: "Because Liza is still using her face - sort of."
Carr's enemies focus on his doctorate, a qualification in Computing Information Systems from the Californian branch of the Pacific Western University, based in Hawaii, an on-line institution widely critiqued as a "diploma-mill". But when I called the relevant universities to check on his previous degrees (the first, also in computing, from the University of San Francisco, the second a Master's in management from the University of Redlands, California) both confirmed his CV as genuine. So did his former employers, including the LAPD. Carr currently works part-time for a satellite campus of the University of Phoenix, lecturing in Comparative Religion.
What I can't understand, given his loyalty to Michael Jackson, is why Carr has apparently ignored an open letter the singer released in March, which is essentially a desperate plea to Firpo - he is mentioned by name - to shut up.
"Michael sent me a letter to say, hey - for the record - don't represent me," Carr says. "But then he cleared me to speak. And his mom and dad, and the family, are like: 'Oh, please, get out there and speak for us. They are slaughtering him in the press.'"
Firpo perseveres, "out of love. I am outraged at what is happening to Michael, because I believe there is a racist component in all of this."
Carr cites the unease Jackson generated when he started having his security handled by the Nation of Islam. "Nobody complained when Howard Hughes was protected by Mormons," he argues. "Even though the Book of Mormon teaches that a dark-skinned man will have to turn white to enter heaven."
"Michael Jackson should have no worries there, then."
"Michael's a light-skinned black man," says Carr, good-naturedly.
"He's a man who has changed colour," I argue. One of his own doctors has confirmed that he used the bleaching agent, Benoquin.
"Michael has vitiligo. I've seen it. OK, he tried to bleach his skin, to even it out. It's outlandish to me that people suggest Michael Jackson is * trying to be white. In any case," Carr asks, in an amiably ironic tone, "who would want to be white?"
How would it have been, asks Carr - referring to the November 2003 raid on Neverland - "if 70 black officers had invaded Graceland, and taken Elvis to have his genitals photographed? [As Jackson's were, during the Chandler investigation, which resulted in no criminal charges.] The black community is very upset. The feeling is: if you can get to Michael, you can get to any of us. We have to rally around."
Jackson wasn't arrested because he's black, but because he's accused of assaulting young boys; Presley would have been treated no differently.
"I beg to differ, because Elvis slept with an underaged girl," says Carr, arguing that Presley's relationship with his wife Priscilla, which began when she was 14, suggests that he was dating her "in the Biblical sense".
"But had Presley done what Jackson is accused of doing, you wouldn't blame the police for arresting him."
"I just want people to be treated equally - black or white. Michael was manhandled when he was arrested, we are told."
"He claimed that he was handcuffed too tightly, and shut in a room 'decorated with doo-doo'."
"Right," Carr says. "Human faeces. [Country singer] Glen Campbell knees his booking sergeant - knees him - and that's OK. Because Glen Campbell's a good old boy. But what happens if you are Magic Johnson, or Michael Jordan, or Michael Jackson? You're all still niggers."
"Does Jackson himself feel that?"
"I know he does."
"That he is being treated like a *#*#*#?"
"Yes."
"He said that to you?"
"I won't repeat exactly what he said. But he is convinced that, with the people who are out to get him - the authorities - there is a racial element to it. OK, if Michael was guilty, fine. But let's treat suspects equally."
When the Mexican waiter comes in with coffee, Carr chats in Spanish. Back in his mother tongue, his conversation is punctuated with thoughts about the derivation of modern vocabulary, with reference to Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic. He served an unusual apprenticeship for academic life, growing up in Nickerson Gardens, the largest and most formidable housing project in Watts, South Central LA, on a street now in the heartland of the notorious gang, the Bloods.
Firpo is the second youngest in a family of five boys and four girls.
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全文这里：
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/features/story.jsp?story=538689
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[此贴子已经被作者于2004-7-11 22:00:34编辑过]
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发表于 2004-7-10 00:00:00
发表于 2004-7-10 00:00:00