SANTA MARIA, Calif., March 19
The former housekeeper is sworn in, sits nervously at the witness stand and spells her name for the court: Kiki Fournier. She is in her mid-thirties, has dark blond hair cut plainly in a working-mom's bob and is wearing a canary-yellow sweater and dark pants. One of the first questions the district attorney has is whether she tried to get out of testifying in California v. Michael Jackson. "Yes," she says.
"Why is that?" he asks.
Oh, the banality: To witness the Michael Jackson trial as it creeps interminably along is to be underwhelmed by the ordinariness of it all.
(Ric Francis -- AP)
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"I don't want to have anything to do with this," she says. "I just -- I don't like being the center of attention, ever."
For all the time Fournier put in at Neverland -- working as a Jackson employee from 1991 to 2003, picking up after him, serving his meals, mopping his floors -- she is now being rewarded with a day spent under oath in Foreverland, the meticulously conducted and seemingly unending child-molestation trial of one of the world's most famous (and by reputation most weird) human beings.
Fournier testifies that she saw visiting boys run amok at Neverland Ranch, about what kind of messes they made and how it got bad enough once in a while that she nicknamed the place "Pinocchio's Pleasure Island." She talks about how some of Jackson's young friends threw popcorn in the theater or wrecked golf carts on the grounds. How sometimes they appeared drunk.
It takes most of Thursday to cross-examine her on this and other matters -- such as, how long she's been working to get a community college degree. "You're going to embarrass me," she tells Jackson's defense lawyer, revealing that she started taking classes in 1987 and still hasn't finished. Her stomach growls so loudly at one point that the microphone picks it up, and she blushes, and the judge reminds counsel to have witnesses bring "an energy bar" with them when they show up to court, since there is no lunch break in Foreverland. (Food shows up for the jury from the Olive Garden, and the jurors are admonished.)
Fournier could be your sister. When finally she is dismissed, she walks up the aisle and pushes open the courtroom doors to leave. In that instant, the media photographers in the foyer take her picture. Their flash strobes quietly go fwitsh, fwitsh. The wire services lead that day with her testimony. ("Neverland Housekeeper: Kids Ran Wild.") She is part of it now.
California v. Michael Jackson is a criminal trial, but if you sit on a metal folding chair in an oversize trailer behind the county courthouse watching it on a 35-inch RCA closed-circuit television set (as most of the press does, partly so they can make smart-alecky comments during the proceedings) for a stretch of several days, you also begin to see it as an epic fable: How the values of a 20th-century celebriculture came home to roost in the 21st.
It's about a boy who was famous as a child, perhaps too famous, who has said he suffered some sort of psychological wound from it -- forced by his domineering stage father to perform, even at the times he wished only to play. He parlayed his shyness and excessive talent into a global sensation. Rich beyond imagination, he set about making up for a lost childhood and redesigned his body as well.
He met a boy who was not famous, who lived with his sister and brother and two unhappily married parents in a one-room studio apartment in East Los Angeles. The mother, if some evidence is to be believed, had a showbiz bug, too. She enrolled her children in a summertime "comedy camp" for underprivileged kids at a Sunset Boulevard nightclub, where they met a few famous people, some of whom, when Christmas came around, showed up at their door with big sacks from Best Buy.
Then, in 2000, the boy got cancer, which, bizarrely, can be a one-in-a-million path to a certain style of fame in America, in the way that people suddenly care about your suffering, despite whatever suffering (troubles in school, abusive father, a charge of shoplifting) preceded it.
When you have a disease that leaves you as bald and vulnerable as when you were an infant, Hollywood might want to have its picture taken with you, or might bring you courtside to a Lakers game. As on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," Hollywood might even come and rebuild and refurnish your family's house.
Celebrities have an almost inexplicable need to be near sick kids. Someone from the Make-a-Wish Foundation comes to your hospital room and asks you to make one. Michael Jackson calls your hospital room. Not just once, but 20 times, and you can talk to him, unless you're already busy with sitcom star George Lopez, movie star Chris Tucker, or the local weatherman, or trying to place calls to Jay Leno.
