A curse on all those mean Michael bashers

Vanity Fair is reporting in its April issue, and television is spreading the word, that Michael Jackson once paid $150,000 to have a voodoo curse placed on 25 of his enemies. I don’t believe it.

I don’t believe much of anything I read anymore and nothing I see on television, unless it comes from Wolf Blitzer. I trust Wolf. If Wolf says it’s true, it’s true. Wolf looks you right in the eye and never smiles and tells it like it is.

But Wolf, to the best of my knowledge, has never discussed the Michael Jackson voodoo story, and I am dismissing it as yet another savage attack on an innocent man-child beset by rumors and mocked by thoughtless comedians. I even heard one performer call him the King of Poop. I could have slapped him.

My mission today is to clear up some of the situations of late that have made Jackson the butt of many jokes. He’s so unhappy that he hardly touches his Slurpee machine anymore or plays with his stuffed toys. Such a nice boy so badly treated.

Let’s deal first with that baby-dangling event. As many of you know, Michael loves children. A lot. So everyone was naturally shocked to see him dangle his infant son from a fourth-floor window in Berlin. But it wasn’t cruelty, it was just a terrible misunderstanding.

Because Michael likes kids so much, he was simply responding to what he thought was a request by his son. The baby was saying “dingle,” which is baby-talk for a bottle, and Jackson thought he was saying “dangle.” Being a good father, he attempted to accommodate the kid. It was only later that he realized the boy simply wanted his bottle! Michael felt so bad about the incident that he sent his son a letter of apology and a check for $15 million.

Then there’s the nose business. Many have wondered how over the years Jackson’s nose has gone from that of an African American to an abbreviated Pinocchian spindle.

You might recall that Jackson admitted in that horrible Martin Bashir interview that he had cosmetic surgery performed twice on his nose, but he never said why.

The sad truth is, Michael suffers from a rare disease that causes his nose to spread over his face. Without cosmetic surgery, his entire face would have been composed of nose, thereby impacting unpleasantly on his career.

The same disease affected his skin color, turning him into a Swede and making his eyes large and appealing, despite everything he did to counteract the affliction. It simply isn’t true that he was attempting to achieve eyes similar to those of Bambi, his favorite deer, or the space alien friend who often overnights at Neverland.

Then there’s that matter of sleeping with Earth boys. Michael, or Mikey, as he likes to be called, admitted as much in the Bashir interview and added that sleeping with someone is the finest way of expressing love. True. For centuries, men have expressed their love for women by sleeping with as many as possible, and Groucho Marx is said to have expressed his love for cigars by sleeping with a box of panatelas under his pillow.

Jackson simply likes kids, which is why he lives in an amusement park. Some people snuggle with their puppies at night, others cuddle up with the kind of women Heidi Fleiss once employed. One snuggles with that which comforts the person within.

Finally, that totally misunderstood voodoo business. Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth reported that in 2000 Jackson paid an African witch doctor named Baba (Baba?) $150,000 to place a curse on 25 of his enemies, including Steven Spielberg. The ritual supposedly involved killing 42 cows and was designed to see that Jackson’s enemies would be dead within a week.

Three years later, Spielberg is still producing fine movies, proving beyond doubt that if there was such a curse, it failed. Would Jackson have stood for a failed curse? Never! He would immediately have requested his $150,000 back and used it to further refine his nose. As for the 42 dead cows, they were for a barbecue, silly. Jackson gathered a whole bunch of young African boys together for a party! What a sweet guy.

I hope that clears the air. The poor man’s got enough on his back, what with rumors of a faltering career and all. But don’t worry about that either. The perky Moon Walker is planning a big comeback. Cosmetic surgery will turn him into a double for Shirley Temple, and a routine based on “The Good Ship Lollipop” will rock the world. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Wolf Blitzer.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.