MORE TO READ: "One Year Later: Our Complete Jackson Coverage"
If Michael Jackson had lived to perform the concerts he was preparing for at London’s O2 Arena, and if those shows had been as extraordinary as the film “This Is It” suggests they could have been, Jackson would have pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in pop music history.
But not the biggest.
And he wouldn’t have been the first iconic star to come back in a blaze of glory after retiring from public view, or after years in which he’d faded as a vital force.
Elvis did it, and Sinatra, and Judy Garland, and other pop legends over the years. The comeback is part and parcel of any true icon’s story, and Jackson likely would have fit neatly into a long continuum if he had lived.
As it was, Jackson’s death put him into a slightly different category: the posthumous comeback. His return to prominence, which came first with sales of his back catalog and then with the release of the film “This Is It,” puts him in the same category as John Lennon, who was murdered just after the release of “Double Fantasy,” his first album of new material in six years; or Roy Orbison, who died immediately after recording the remarkable “Mystery Girl” album, and while enjoying a commercial resurgence as part of the mock-supergroup the Traveling Wilburys.
Depending on what happened afterwards, Jackson’s return after several years of seclusion and controversy could have been one of the top comebacks ever. But the bar is set awfully high in that neighborhood. Since Jackson always did love competition, here’s who he would have been going up against for the title of the ultimate comeback kid:
Frank Sinatra: Contrary to the implications in “The Godfather,” it didn’t take a severed horse’s head to give Frank Sinatra the role that sealed his comeback. But it wasn’t easy.
By the late 1940s, Sinatra’s status as the major teen idol of the era was fading – and worse, his voice was in decline as well. In early 1950 he suffered hemorrhaging of the vocal cords and had to leave the stage of the Copacabana; afterwards, the onetime phenom seemed to be washed up. His television show was canceled, and his record label dropped him.
But against the wishes of director Fred Zinnemann, Sinatra won the plum role of Private Maggio in “From Here to Eternity.” (In “The Godfather,” an Italian-American singer gets a key film role with the help of a mob boss; less fanciful theories say Sinatra’s then-wife, Ava Gardner, used her influence with studio chief Harry Cohn.)
Co-star Burt Lancaster attributed Sinatra’s performance to his real-life “sense of defeat and the whole world crashing in on him."
