Michael Jackson to Be Buried at Private Ceremony, Say La Officials

As Los Angeles braces itself for tomorrow's massive crowds hoping to take part in Michael Jackson's final performance - his memorial - speculation was mounting that the star's body would be laid to rest tomorrow morning in a private family ceremony in Hollywood.

As the Jackson family and event organisers scrambled to put the finishing touches to the memorial service at the Staples Center in downtown LA, city officials reported that a pre-emptive funeral would be held ahead of the event and out of the prying reach of the paparazzi. Since the singer's death on 25 June the family has consistently refused to discuss funeral arrangements.

Jan Perry, an LA city council member who has been acting as temporary mayor, is reported by the entertainment website Radar as saying that the funeral would start at 8am local time tomorrow at the Forest Lawn cemetery in the Hollywood Hills. The assistant police chief Jim McDonnell also confirmed that the family was planning a private ceremony at Forest Lawn, though he did not stipulate when it would happen or whether it would include a burial.

Jackson's body is understood to be lying near to the cemetery, and crowd control fences have already been put up around it to control any public surge. Residents nearby have reported a buzz of activity in the neighborhood, including fly-overs by police helicopters.

The cemetery is the resting place of such luminaries from the worlds of acting and soul music as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis Jr, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye.

The details of the funeral are as shrouded in mystery as its location and timing. The entertainment website TMZ, which broke the original story about Jackson collapsing at his rented home in Bel Air, said he would be buried in a gold-plated coffin costing $25,000 as deployed for James Brown.

Others have reported that his body would be laid out in the velvet lining of the coffin by his friend Karen Faye and dressed by his longtime costume designers Michael Bush and Dennis Thompkins.

The final act in the Michael Jackson story has been marked fittingly by the same mass of confusion bordering on chaos that was a feature of so much of his life. How the memorial itself unfolds has itself been a subject of enormous speculation, with organisers giving out next to no details in advance.

Among the names floated with varying degrees of confidence likely to appear in some form are Mariah Carey, performing the Jackson 5 classic I'll Be There according to TMZ, Steve Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Lionel Richie, Little Richard and Jennifer Hudson.

Al Sharpton, the Harlem-based preacher who is a friend of the family and who has been ubiquitous in the past few days, is expected to speak.

An informed guess is that the event will feature some kind of musical tribute along the lines of Ray Charles' 2004 funeral, which featured gospel choirs and performances by the likes of Wonder and BB King as well as rousing speeches by colleagues, admirers and preachers.

The memorial is being produced by Ken Ehrlich, who stages the annual Grammy awards and whose company, like the Staples Center, is owned by Jackson's concert promoters, AEG.

The police are setting up a perimeter several blocks around the Staples Center, the idea being to keep anyone without a ticket or a wristband out of eye shot and thus deterring them from sticking around.

Already today, traffic around downtown LA was slowed to a trickle by the steady stream of lucky fans who drove to Dodger Stadium, just north of the downtown skyline, to pick up their allocated pairs of tickets. More than 1.5 million people put in bids for one of the 8,750 pairs of free fan tickets - just over half of them to the memorial itself, and the rest to an overflow space next door at the Nokia Theater where the memorial will be broadcast on a jumbo screen.

With all eyes now on the front-of-stage celebration of Jackson's life, the grubbier side of the fallout of his death was also on display. His mother Katherine was in court attempting to stave off administration of his estate being granted to the two executors named in his 2002 will.

But her case was dismissed by the Los Angeles judge, Mitchell Beckoff, who ruled that Jackson's friend, the entertainment lawyer John Branca, and music executive John McClain will be in charge of the estate out of respect for the singer's wishes reflected in the will. Their term at the "helm of the ship", as the judge put it, will run until 3 August when another hearing will take place.

Though Jackson goes to his grave with his finances in an epic mess, a court filing estimates that after debts his estate may still be worth more than $500m.

It includes such cash cows as a 50% stake in the Sony-ATV music publishing catalogue that includes songs by John Lennon and PaulMcCartney.