Neverland

A surreal journey into Michael Jackson's Neverland

Chris Ayres
Neverland was deserted. After crossing a wooden stile, we reached a railway station with an elderly couple sitting on a bench. At first I thought they were real; then I noticed their yellowing, milky eyes, and their dead, waxwork stares. They were waiting an eternity for a train they would never board. A pink flamingo tiptoed by. I could hear an elephant, then a tiger.

It was already clear that Neverland’s owner was the victim of a rare and possibly celebrity-induced psychosis. There were waxworks everywhere: more elderly couples; a clown holding out a cooler full of ice cream; a grandfather in Dickensian costume brandishing a platter of English toffees. Their faces were all set in the same zombie glare. I began to wonder if there were recording devices in the waxworks’ eye sockets. Where had Jackson managed to find all this crap? Above, cameras gleamed in the treetops. A Walt Disney soundtrack played through loudspeakers disguised as rocks.

The only real people we could see were Jackson’s radio-wired henchmen, buzzing around on the horizon in golf buggies. I felt as if we were on a private island owned by some whacked-out Third World dictator. Perhaps this was all a trap, I thought; perhaps we were about to be imprisoned, nipple-clamped, and forced to listen to Earth Song for the rest of our lives.

Adding to the general sense of unease were the statues of children everywhere: some of them partly clothed, others completely naked. Given Jackson’s legal history, and the fuss over the documentary in which he talked about sleeping with other people’s kids, you would have thought he might have replaced them with something less provocative by now – bearded gnomes, perhaps. Then again, Jackson probably thought the Peter Pan theme justified it all.

With nothing better to do, we continued our odyssey through Jackson’s ranch, eventually reaching the other side. A collection of rustic-looking bungalows sat next to a little bridge and a flamingo pond. In one direction was an even larger train terminal (and, I assumed, Jackson’s private residence), outside which was a giant outdoor clock, dug into the side of the hill. Above was the word “Neverland”, spelt out in yellow blooms. In the other direction was a paved driveway and the ranch’s main entrance, at which stood a pair of huge gold-leafed gates featuring Jackson’s fake royal crest and a silhouette of Peter Pan, gazing down from a painted moon. In a nearby bush was another statue of a naked boy, his little foot raised above a plastic slug.

I wondered if Jackson had always been this unhinged, or if it was just fame, mass adulation, an authoritarian father, unlimited wealth, and a staff of nodding flunkies that had driven him to it. I once read that Jackson had always loved to shock people, loved to pull stunts and confuse the press or lie to them. But at some point he became the stunt, and by then he’d forgotten how to even pretend to be normal. That’s the trick, I suppose – knowing when normal is no longer normal.

We were disturbed by clattering metal and the shriek of a whistle. And then, as if from another dimension, a little red steam train appeared. It scared the hell out of me. I didn’t even realize we had been standing on train tracks. The train’s miniature carriages were all empty. “All aboard!” shouted the conductor, in a sickly tenor. He was some kind of circus midget, and he was dressed like the waxworks in Victorian costume.

To another shriek of the whistle, we boarded. The train began to shudder forward. As the carriages bucked and rattled, we passed the by now familiar sight of more nude children. Then came a stone bridge, a swimming pool, a video-games arcade, another flamingo pond, an Indian village complete with wigwams and a waxwork chief, a wooden fort, and then, finally, a fairground with a Ferris wheel, carousel, dodgems and other rides. Everything looked slightly dilapidated, as though the machines hadn’t been oiled or painted since the Eighties, when Jackson was still earning more than he could spend. No doubt some fairground contractor was ripping him off, along with everyone else.

We got off the train near the zoo, petted one of Jackson’s elephants for a while, explored a dank outhouse in which a snake the width of tree hissed and squirmed in a filthy tank, then ducked into Neverland’s cinema, near a basketball court. There was a glass window in the cinema’s lobby, behind which was a wooden model of Jackson moonwalking. It reminded me of a Christmas window display on Fifth Avenue — only a cheap, Chinese-made, imitation. Perhaps Jackson had bought the wooden moonwalking doll from the same place he bought the waxworks.

We allowed ourselves to be carried by the swell of the crowd into a marquee, by the merry-go-round. It was packed. Young girls were sobbing with joy. Grown men were dancing to Kylie Minogue. The marquee darkened when the music ended.

Lasers swooped. Fake thunder boomed. And then Jackson emerged, Jesus-like, on a steel platform 10ft above the crowd. Was this as close to him as we were going to get? I was struck by his tiny figure; it was that of a teenage girl, not a middle-aged man. He wore a black sequined suit. But no amount of sequins could distract from his terrible, broken face. From somewhere behind his flame-retardant hairpiece — or perhaps it was real — Jackson squeaked out a thank you and riffed with merciful brevity on the themes of children, hope and the future. Then he hung back as Mike Tyson joined him on the platform and began to cut his birthday cake. It seemed like as good a time as any to leave.

Somewhere out in the gloom of the estate we found a shuttle to take us back to the car park. I sat next to a man in a leather jacket. He said he was Michael’s dermatol- ogist, and started to tell me all about Bubbles, Jackson’s chimpanzee. It turned out that Bubbles had been evicted from Neverland after turning inexplicably violent. I knew exactly how the poor chimp felt.

Reunited with the Jeep, we wobbled our way back down Neverland’s driveway, then headed southwest, back to the San Marcos Pass and the relative sanity of LA.

Chris Ayres 2008. Edited extract from Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale, published by John Murray in July 2008 at £12.99