In his new memoir, Elton John describes a bizarre lunch with Michael Jackson. 'It was stranger than I could have imagined,' writes John
Michael Jackson with Elton John in 1978. Photo: Adam Scull/Shutterstock Seemingly every celebrity to have walked the earth in the ’70s and ’80s makes an appearance in Elton John’s new memoir, Me: the famed, the disgraced, and everyone in between. And Michael Jackson, whose legacy has been reevaluated after new child-molestation allegations came out in the documentary Leaving Neverland, is not exempt from John’s pen.
John first met Jackson in his teens: “After a gig I played in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Taylor had turned up on the Starship [John’s private jet] with him in tow,” he remembers. “He was just the most adorable kid you could imagine.” Yet over time, that changed. “God knows what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles,” John continues.
When John called Furnish to say that Jackson would be coming to the lunch, he “was interrupted by an anguished yell of ‘are you fucking KIDDING me?’” “No, I insisted, it wouldn’t be as strange as he might expect,” John writes. “In that respect at least, I was absolutely right. The meal wasn’t as strange as I might have expected. It was stranger than I could have imagined.” As John tells it:
It was a sunny day and we had to sit indoors with the curtains drawn because of Michael’s vitiligo. The poor guy looked awful, really frail and ill. He was wearing make-up that looked like it had been applied by a maniac: it was all over the place. His nose was covered with a sticking plaster which kept what was left of it attached to his face. He sat there, not really saying anything, just giving off waves of discomfort the way some people give off an air of confidence.
Later, John reflects on Jackson’s behavior and career, writing, “I honestly think that’s one of the things that tipped Michael Jackson over the edge: he was convinced he could make an album bigger than Thriller, and was crushed every time it didn’t happen.
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