Pity the poor, rich, famous celebrity. Really.

Nobody will ever look back at Michael Jackson and say, “That man had a wonderful life.” He started out as a buoyant kid loaded with musical talent. By the time he died Thursday, he was a freakish-looking recluse whose plastic surgeries and skin-whitening treatments had left him looking like a ghostly villain from a “Batman” movie.

In the interim, what a career.

Jackson’s 1982 album “Thriller” outsold anything recorded by the Beatles or Elvis Presley. All told, he sold more than 750 million albums and secured a place right up there with Elvis and the Fab Four. He amassed a huge personal fortune.

Yet he died a pathetic figure, in debt, isolated, shadowed by persistent allegations of child molestation. His untimely heart attack may have been hastened by excessive doses of prescription drugs he was taking to assist a comeback attempt.

Jackson joins a pantheon of superstars, stars and semi-stars who might have fared much better had they never been trapped in the spotlights, grown addicted to adulation and acquired fortunes large enough to indulge their most destructive appetites.

Elvis himself, Britney Spears, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse and any number of other icons of rock, pop, country, video and cinema.

Even the more firmly grounded are pursued b y furies. Princess Diana, killed attempting to escape paparazzi. Farrah Fawcett, who saw her personal medical records raided and publicized while she was dying of cancer. Susan Boyle, who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after the final round of “Britain’s Got Talent.” Boyle’s family said she’d been “battered nonstop for the past seven weeks.”

For some, it’s a royal life. But it chews up and spits out the emotionally vulnerable. Human beings weren’t designed for the round-the-clock predations of sneak photographers and professional gossips, relentless pressure to keep winning global popularity contests, electronic media and tabloids that leave celebrities with no place to hide.

They do ask for it. Jon and Kate Gosselin signed up to have their private lives – spats and all – play out in front of millions of television viewers. Dragging children into a reality show ought to be classified as a form of abuse.

Michael Jackson, though, seemed sucked into a vortex not of his own making. His father reportedly brutalized him and his brothers into becoming The Jackson Five. They hit the big time fast, and Jackson was almost catapulted into stardom. Like many stunning musical talents, he couldn’t help but take the world by storm – the compulsion to create and entertain was too great. For a man who, inwardly, seems to have always remained a shy little boy, the storm was a tough place to live.