Vanity Fair’s Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett issue

Vanity project
Conversations with MJ, bizarre behaviour from Ryan O’Neal

Vanity Fair are about to release a double cover issue featuring stories on late stars Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.

The MJ story, which features photos from a 1989 VF shoot with Annie Leibovitz, has been written by journalist Lisa Robinson who interviewed Michael many times starting from 1972 when he was just 14 (although, per Motown publicity instruction, he was still pretending he was two years younger).

Lisa has gone through years of tapes and found some interesting quotes from the past.

In 1977 she asked him about dating:

“No, I don’t date, no. I’m not really interested right now. I like girls and everything but [laughs] ... Oh; you think I’m one of those? No! I’m just not that interested right now.”

In 1978 he spoke about his relationship with his fans:

“I enjoy all that sometimes, seeing people who love me, or buy my records. I think it’s fun, and I enjoy meeting my fans and I think it’s important. But sometimes people think you owe your life to them; they have a bad attitude, like ‘I made you who you are’. That may be true – but not that one person. Sometimes you have to say to them, if the music wasn’t good, you wouldn't have bought it. Because some of them think they actually own you.”

In a 1984 he also admitted to Lisa that he thought the original mix of the Thriller album “sounded like crap”:

“Oh, it was terrible. And I cried at the listening party. I said, ‘I’m sorry – we can’t release this’. I called a meeting with Quincy [Jones], and everybody at the [record] company was screaming that we had to have it out and there was a deadline, and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not releasing it’. I said, ‘It’s terrible’. So we re-did a mix a day. Like a mix a day. And we rested two days, then we did a mixing. We were overworked, but it all came out OK.”

Another, rather ambiguous quote (hopefully the full story will put it into better context), is about his relationship with his family following The Jacksons’ 1984 Victory Tour:

“I've always tried to do everything first-class. Use people who are the best. But it was a different story with the family. And the fact that it was the biggest tour that ever happened, and my success had been so overwhelming, it's as if they're wanting to throw darts at you, too.”

You can see Lisa talk about Michael and hear excerpts of their conversations in the below video.

As for the Farrah story, by writer Leslie Bennetts, her partner Ryan O’Neal describes a bizarre incident at Farrah’s funeral where he tried to crack onto Michael Jackson’s childhood friend Tatum O’Neal.

You know … HIS OWN DAUGHTER … AT HIS PARTNER’S FUNERAL.

“I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me,” Ryan told me. “I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me – Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.”

“That’s our relationship in a nutshell,” Tatum said when I asked her about it. “You make of it what you will.” She sighed. “It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.”

And to think people, such has his own three kids, have called him a bad father.

Scott Keenan
I love some of my fans too o’clock