In this handout photo provided by Harrison Funk/The Jackson Family, Janet Jackson, Randy Jackson, Jackie Jackson, Tito Jackson, Jermaine Jackson and Marlon Jackson attend Michael Jackson's funeral service held at Glendale Forest Lawn Memorial Park on September 3, 2009 in Glendale, California. Jackson, 50, the king of pop, died at UCLA Medical Center after going into cardiac arrest at his rented home on June 25, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harrison Funk/The Jackson Family via Getty Images)
GLENDALE, Calif. - In a tree-lined clearing of Forest Lawn Memorial Park here, about 200 of Michael Jackson's family and friends gathered for the final leg of the pop singer's odyssey from death to interment on a hot Thursday evening exactly 10 weeks after he was found dead.
The service, scheduled for sunset, became a nighttime gathering as guests awaited the late arrival of Jackson's family. They were ferried through the park's towering gates in a fleet of luxury cars and took their places in the front rows of white folding chairs. The Jackson brothers, in black suits and red ties, filed past a portrait of Michael, a confident smile on his face. His children made their way to their seats. A bespectacled Paris Jackson, his young daughter, wearing a dark dress and her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, watched soberly.
Among the mourners were many of the touchstones of his life: Elizabeth Taylor, who arrived in a Maybach; former child star Macaulay Culkin; lawyer Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., who successfully defended Jackson from child molestation charges; and choreographer-director Kenny Ortega, who was directing Jackson's planned London concerts. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, baseball player Barry Bonds, Marlon Brando's son, Miko, and comic Chris Tucker were also there.
As dusk turned to night, an orange moon hung in the sky, appropriate for the singer, whose spooky "Thriller" song and video are legendary in the annals of pop music.
The Glendale police established a security cordon, blocking off streets around the 300-acre cemetery and relegating the sprinkling of fans who showed up to positions behind barricades a couple of blocks away.
Jackson was to be interred in a crypt in the Holly Terrace, one of 11 halls in the Great Mausoleum, Forest Lawn's vast granite- and marble-filled palazzo that serves as the star-studded resting place of Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and other screen legends. The Holly Terrace is dominated at one end by an expansive stained-glass window.
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