Did I tell you guys about the time I met him?
I was a room service waiter at the Hotel Bel-Air. Quincy Jones, his producer, had been staying at the hotel for a few months during and after his divorce from Peggy Lipton (she got the house, apparently). Michael came to visit him a couple times.
It was always a big deal when Jackson came to the hotel because they had to let his limo through a gate in the back so he didn't have to walk through the front entrance, like everyone else. There was nothing wrong with the front entrance, BTW; just about every famous person in the world in the mid 1980s came through there, and nobody ever got hassled by fans or paparazzi. The hotel was isolated enough that there was no way for someone who didn't belong there to sneak up on celebrities, which is why so many celebrities stayed there or dropped in for meals.
One time, when I was working an evening shift as room service captain, a couple waiters came back from a run with the news that Martin Scorsese was in Quincy Jones' room. One of the waiters was an aspiring screenwriter (like me) and the other was an aspiring actor, so this was a very big celebrity sighting for us. They told me I should take the next order to the room so I could get a glimpse.
And by the way, they added, Michael Jackson opened the door when they brought the order.
So another order came from Jones' room a little while later, and I took it down with one of the waiters. (There were all kinds of crazy steps in that place, so it took two of us to carry the room service tables to most of the rooms.) Sure enough, Michael Jackson opened the door again.
He was still black then, skinny as pipe cleaners, dressed pretty normally in jeans and a button-down shirt, and he had those incredibly shiny Jheri curls. He said, "Hi, how you doing?" in the falsetto voice.
And that was it. Probably the most normal encounter any adults ever had with the guy.
Given what we learned about him and the weirdness he enveloped himself in later in his life, I always thought the room-service story was telling.
Quincy Jones wanted to direct movies, so he brought over Scorsese to talk about how to do it. In the minute or two I was in the doorway of the hotel room I could see that Jones and Scorsese were in an intense conversation. Jackson, by far the biggest star in the world at that moment, seemed to get a kick out of doing something normal like answering the door.
The hotel didn't have massive suites, so when a celebrity stayed there and ordered room service, there wasn't anyplace to hide. We always met the actual celebrity. It was usually a perfunctory encounter -- nothing interesting beyond the fact it's a celebrity.
But with Michael Jackson, that's probably the only time I delivered an order where a big celebrity opened the door and greeted the waiters when it wasn't even his room.
Like I said, he really seemed to get a kick out of the normality of doing a little thing like that.
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