Michael Jackson was hardly cold when a perky anchor-ette from Entertainment Weekly popped up on CNN outside UCLA Medical Center with a scoop -- a photo of the dying singer inside the ambulance as paramedics worked to resucitate him (although one was evidently hoping his cell-phone battery would last). 

"Wow," said Larry King, in the same tone of voice Walter Cronkite used when we, as children, were wakened to see a man walk on the moon. "How'd you get that shot?"

I can't quote her directly, but the EW (as in EEEEWWWW) reporter remarked, "We're always working Larry."

"That's just amazing reporting," said Larry King, who'd had to switch back throughout the night from his own photo with my generation's greatest superstar.

That's just amazing, period.

Michael Jacksonwas as probably about as circumspect in his personal life as Vincent Van Gogh and probably for some of the same reasons, once he but he was also the inspiration for tough kids to work out their rivalries in dance -- remember that? He also was someone's child and someone's brother -- not to mention someone's father. Maybe Michael Jackson wouldn't have been my pick for a pop but why was his wish to be a father was a constant source of mockery? Why was his serial naming of his children after himself (which we loved when cuddly George Foreman, once a man who could knock a door off a refrigerator, did the same thing) a sort of cultural scandal?

If he was not, indeed, a criminal, then a great many people have suffered less for stranger behavior. Either way, Michael Jackson  probably deserved, in death, the dignity that eluded him in life -- through his own fault and through the hard work of those who pushed him hard or wished him ill.

A friend of mine knew Michael Jackson well (I mean every-day well, not I-saw-him-at-a-party-with-my-cousin's-ex-boyfriend well). She said that while she had nothing but a hunch that her good acquaintance had not caused harm beyond embarrassment to any child, she also agreed that his life was axiomatic of the proverb that says if a father treats his little boy like a man, that boy will grow up to be a man who acts like a little boy.

While he sealed his life away, or seemed to try at times, Michael Jackson could not bear to lose perhaps the truest love he had ever known -- that of his fans. Always, he would emerge, frailer and stranger each time, clearly shredded by time and injury and bad medicine. Judging by the number of hits at this moment on his videos versus the number of hits on his shuttered and dying face, it seems his fans love him still, enough to let him alone.

It was an amazing piece of reporting -- like that shot of River Phoenix in his coffin. And I thought I'd lost my capacity to be amazed in that way. But some things, like the gag reflex, die hard.