"Oh, honey, people believe what they want to believe," said Ava Gardner, questioned on her flamboyant public image.

***

Only hours after Michael Jackson’s impressive memorial service at L.A.’s Staples Center, I had a long chat with somebody who knew Michael, "not an intimate ‘best friend,’" my source advised, but someone who saw Michael parenting his children over a number of years. I think these observations bear repeating:

"You, know, whenever I read anything about Michael Jackson, or saw him on TV or in interviews, I always thought, ‘Oh, how weird!’ But whenever I met him with his children, I’d think, ‘Oh, how normal!’ Eventually, I purposely avoided reading or watching anything about him. I preferred to relate to him as a parent."

And what kind of parent was Michael Jackson?

"I have to say, and I know it’s hard to believe, but a very good one. He was gentle with them, but stern when he needed to be. Once, he and the kids were over and one of them was being a little unruly, like a normal youngster. Well, something got broken. It was nothing valuable and I said just forget it and of course like any child, this one was happy to be let off the hook.

"But Michael wouldn’t have it. He said, ‘No. You broke something. You have to have respect for people’s things. I want you to apologize properly.’ And so the child did, and that was the end of it, but I was impressed. He wanted his children to have normal values. Of course, they had a lot, materially, but he seemed to instill in them that they were special because they had so much and shouldn’t take it for granted.

"Whatever issues Michael had elsewhere in his life, it seemed to me he was trying to do double duty in giving his children love, but not indulge them, or encourage outrageous behavior. I must say, there wasn’t one ‘weird’ characteristic in Michael Jackson when it came to his parenting. After I got to know him, the rest of it fell away. I’m not saying he didn’t have issues, but they were absent with the children, and honestly, I came not even to think of him as ‘that’ Michael Jackson."

I asked my source, who had become somewhat emotional in remembering Michael, how he thought the children would fare now, with their only parent gone. There was a long pause.

"In all the time I knew Michael, I never heard him criticize one member of his family. On the other hand, I never heard him praise any of them or mention even one of them. My impression of the Jackson family is one of dysfunction and jealousy and guilt, qualities that were not a part of Michael’s parenting and the world he created for his kids. While Michael was alive, his children knew only love. I’m a little concerned at what they’ll have to contend with now, because they are really quite alone."

***

Aside from Michael Jackson’s departure and then "the departure" of Sarah Palin from public political life, to go fishing – these are already the dog days and nothing much is going on.

For instance, over the 4th, where was the glamorous Nicole Kidman? Why, she was at a wedding in Rhinebeck, NY, with her husband, Keith Urban, and they were holding their gorgeous baby girl, one-year-old Sunday Rose, in their arms.

The wedding joined the director Griffin Dunne to his devoted Australian film and magazine stylist, Anna Bingemann. There were 80 guests, many from Down Under, and the most literary and celebrated of these was the groom’s famous father, writer Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair.