The private Michael, as Lionel Richie would reveal decades later in his memoir, truly was something considerably different, and the difference was not what you would expect from the contrast between a public persona and a private person. It was not a hidden darkness or a secret cruelty or any of the more dramatic forms that private contradictions take.
It was something more unexpected than any of that. It was jeans that were too short or falling off. It was a T-shirt that had been worn for several days running. It was, according to Quincy Jones, who had the particular license of a long-time collaborator to say things that other people only thought, the nickname Smelly. Lionel Richie at first encountered the private Michael Jackson in in early 1980s, during the period of their closest collaboration, the years that included We Are the World and the albums and the tours that had made Michael the
most famous entertainer on the planet. They had known each other since 1971, when Lionel had found a 12-year-old Michael crying on a dressing room floor in Baltimore and sat beside him until he was ready to go on stage. That was the beginning of something that lasted four decades, a friendship that survived the transformation of the 12-year-old child into a global phenomenon of a scale that the history of popular music had never previously produced.
By the mid-1980s, Michael Jackson was not merely famous, he was famous in a way that had no real precedent, famous in the specific way that only happens once or twice in a generation, when a single person becomes so completely the focus of the world’s collective attention that ordinary life becomes genuinely impossible for them.
He could not walk into a store. He could not sit in a restaurant. He could not send his clothes to the dry cleaner without those clothes disappearing, kept quietly and without apology as souvenirs by the people who handled them. This was not speculation or exaggeration, it was the practical reality of a fame that had grown beyond any system designed to contain it.
Lionel would ask Michael about his clothes, about the specific jeans that seemed to be the same jeans he had seen last time, that were somehow even more wrong-fitting than before, that hung off him in ways that suggested either significant weight loss or the complete absence of anyone paying attention to whether they fit.
Michael’s answer, delivered with the casual ease of someone reporting a fact rather than explaining a situation, was that he had been walking past a store in the Valley and the owner had come out and given him a free pair. This was how Michael Jackson acquired jeans in the 1980s, not from a personal shopper or a stylist or a department store visited in secret, from a store owner who recognized him on the street and offered him something for nothing, which Michael accepted because the alternative, attempting to shop in any conventional
way, had ceased to be an option years ago. The dry cleaning problem was the structural explanation for everything else. When Michael sent clothes out to be cleaned, when they left his possession and entered the hands of the people who handled them, they did not come back. Someone at the dry cleaner kept a shirt.
Someone at the laundry kept a jacket. Someone somewhere in the chain of ordinary domestic logistics that most people navigate without thinking, saw Michael Jackson’s belongings and made a private decision that the opportunity to possess something that had touched the most famous person in the world was worth more than any professional obligation to return it. This happened repeatedly.
It happened consistently enough that Michael stopped sending things out because the system had proven too unreliable to depend on. The result was that Michael Jackson, who on stage wore the most meticulously designed costumes in the history of popular performance, had developed in his private life the specific relationship with clothing that develops when a person’s access to ordinary domestic services has been completely severed by their own fame.
He wore what he had. When he ran out of clean things that fit, he wore things that didn’t fit. When things wore out, he wore them anyway because the process of replacing them was complicated enough that it was easier to continue with what was already there. He wore the same pants, Lionel would write, until they were unwearable.
He wore them past the point where anyone watching would have suggested it was time for new pants, and past the point after that, and sometimes past the point where the pants could reasonably be described as functional clothing at all. Quincy Jones observed this, as Quincy observed most things, with the direct, unsentimental clarity of someone who has spent his entire career surrounded by extraordinary talent and has long since stopped treating the extraordinary as deserving of special deference when it is also demonstrably unwashed. He gave
Michael the nickname Smelly. He used it in the studio, in front of other people, with the affectionate bluntness of a long-time collaborator who understands that the most useful thing you can do for someone you care about is occasionally refuse to pretend that something is other than what it is. Michael laughed.
He understood, in the moment of laughing, that the nickname was accurate, that he had not changed his clothes recently, and that the people around him had noticed, and then he laughed some more, and the studio moved on to whatever it had been doing before the nickname arrived, because this was simply part of the texture of the environment.
Lionel watched these interactions with the specific combination of affection and exasperation that characterizes long friendships with people who have significant blind spots. He had known Michael long enough to understand that the clothes situation was not a failure of character or a deliberate eccentricity. It was not Michael choosing to smell bad or to make people uncomfortable with his hygiene, or to communicate anything at all through his relationship with laundry.
It was simply the consequence of a life so thoroughly organized around the extraordinary that the ordinary had been lost somewhere along the way. Michael Jackson, as Lionel would put it, was like an absent-minded professor, but still a kid. Brilliant in the studio where he could distinguish 15 different mixes of the same song and identify which one was right with absolute certainty, completely at sea in the ordinary world where people change their clothes and sent things to the dry cleaner and bought new jeans from stores
they could actually enter without causing a scene. The day that crystallized all of this for Lionel arrived without announcement as the most clarifying days tend to. Michael came to visit him wearing what he was wearing, which was the usual combination of jeans that were not doing their job properly and a T-shirt that had been present for longer than it should have been.
Lionel, who had been a good enough friend for long enough to have developed the specific license that allows one friend to say directly to another what casual acquaintances can only think, assessed the situation and made a decision. He gave Michael a pair of his own jeans. He gave him clean underwear.
He told him to take a shower. Michael, according to Lionel’s account, was sweet about this. He was thankful. He did not protest or take offense or treat the intervention as anything other than the friendly act that it was. He showered. He changed into the clean clothes. He was, when he emerged, the version of himself that the elaborate production machinery of his public life always presented to the world, clean and present and carrying himself with the specific ease of someone who feels comfortable in their own skin.
