Don Rickles Targeted Michael Jackson at a Gala — What Happened Next Surprised Everyone D

In 1984, there was famous and there was Michael Jackson. These were not the same thing. Famous was a category, a level of public recognition that the entertainment industry produced regularly and reliably and had been producing since before anyone in the room had been born. Famous meant your name on a marquee.

Famous meant your face on a magazine cover. Famous meant people turned to look when you walked into a room. Michael Jackson was something else. He had released Thriller in November of 1982. By the spring of 1984, it had sold 30 million copies worldwide. 30 million. The number was so large it had stopped making sense as a number and had become something more like a fact of nature, a thing that simply was, the way weather was, the way gravity was.

You did not argue with 30 million. You did not put it in context or compare it to something else. You accepted it as a new feature of the landscape and tried to adjust. And the man at the center of it, the 25-year-old from Gary, Indiana, who had been performing since he was 6 years old and had spent 19 of those 25 years being watched by the entire world, carried the weight of all of it with a specific quality that nobody who encountered him up close was quite prepared for.

He was quiet, not shy exactly, not withdrawn, something more precise than either of those words, a kind of interior stillness, a man who had learned through necessity and through something deeper than necessity to exist inside himself in a way that the outside world could not easily reach. You could be in a room with Michael Jackson and feel simultaneously that he was completely present and completely somewhere else.

Both things at once. The most famous person in the world and somehow underneath it the most private. Don Rickles had been doing this for 30 years. He had walked into rooms containing Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley and Clint Eastwood. He had read every kind of power and every kind of fame and every kind of the specific force field that surrounds people who exist at the very top of what their industry produces.

He had never walked into a room containing Michael Jackson. The evening was the American Music Awards industry dinner, January 1984, the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, 500 guests in black tie, the specific assembly of record executives and producers and artists that gathered annually to celebrate the previous year’s commercial achievements.

Thriller had swept everything the previous year and Michael Jackson, who had appeared at the actual ceremony 3 days earlier in those gold-encrusted military-style pants and those sunglasses and the single sequin glove and had stood on that stage and received award after award with an expression that suggested the awards were happening to someone slightly different than the person receiving them.

Michael Jackson was at a table near the front of the room with his people around him, the small ecosystem, the handlers and the assistants and the yes people and the no people and all the various human infrastructure that assembled around Michael Jackson everywhere he went because Michael Jackson going anywhere was an event whether he wanted it to be or not.

He sat in the middle of it, quiet, still, that interior quality visible from across the room. Don Rickles walked up to the microphone, looked out at 500 people, did what he always did, and saw Michael Jackson sitting 12 feet from the stage. Now, the calculation happened fast. It always happened fast with Rickles.

The reading of the room, the reading of the target, the understanding of what was possible and what wasn’t and where the line was and how close to it he could get before the room started to pull back. Michael Jackson presented a specific problem, not because of the fame. Rickles had handled fame. Not because of the power.

Rickles had handled power. The specific problem with Michael Jackson was the quality of that stillness, the interior quality, the thing that made him seem simultaneously present and unreachable. You could aim a joke at most people and the joke would either land or it wouldn’t. But aiming a joke at someone who seemed to exist at a slight remove from everything around them was a different challenge.

The joke had to travel further, had to find its way through the stillness to the person inside it. Rickles looked at him. Jackson looked back. Those eyes, dark, direct, a quality of attention in them that was unexpected, not the distracted glance of a famous person tolerating the presence of other people, but genuine attention.

He was watching, really watching, the way performers watch other performers, from the inside of the work with the understanding of what the work required. Rickles leaned into the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I want to take a moment to acknowledge someone very special in the room tonight.” The room settled, the specific settling that happened when Rickles shifted gears.

“A young man who has accomplished more in the last 2 years than most people accomplish in a lifetime.” He paused. “Who has sold more records than anyone in history, who has changed the way music sounds and looks and moves.” Another pause. “Who is, by any reasonable measure, the most famous person on the planet.

” The room was completely quiet. “Michael Jackson, ladies and gentlemen.” The applause was enormous. 500 people acknowledging 30 million albums and the moonwalk and Thriller and everything else that had happened in the previous 14 months all at once. Jackson gave the smallest possible nod, the interior quality intact, receiving the acknowledgement from somewhere slightly inside himself.

Rickles watched him nod. “Michael,” he said, “I have one question.” Jackson looked at him. “The glove.” Rickles held up one hand. “Just one. One glove.” He looked out at the audience. “I’ve been in show business for 30 years. I have never understood the one glove.” He looked back at Jackson. “Where is the other one? Did you lose it? Because I’ve been worried about this for 2 years.

” The room laughed. Jackson did not laugh. He looked at Rickles. That stillness. Rickles felt the room shift into the attentive state it always shifted into when the target didn’t fold immediately. The awareness of 500 people that something was happening that hadn’t been scripted. Jackson’s expression shifted.

Not the laugh yet. Something before the laugh. The interior quality changing slightly. Something moving toward the surface. The slight warming of a person who has been somewhere interior and is beginning to come out. Rickles saw it. “You know what I think happened?” he said. He looked at the audience.

“I think he has the other glove. I think it’s at home. And every night he puts on both gloves and he dances alone in his house and nobody knows.” He looked at Jackson. “That’s the real show, the one we’re not allowed to see.” Jackson laughed. Not the small public acknowledgement, not the gracious smile of a performer receiving a joke at his expense, the real thing, sudden and genuine and from somewhere inside, from behind the stillness, through it, past the interior quality and out into the room. The laugh of a person who had been found by something that managed to reach all the way in. He put his head down slightly. The laugh was brief, but it was real and the room felt the difference because 500 people who had been watching Michael Jackson sit in that stillness

for the entirety of the evening understood that what they had just seen was not a performance. It was a person, the person inside the most famous face in the world briefly and completely present in the room. The room went up, not at the joke, at the laugh. Rickles watched it happen and did the thing he always did at the moment when the room was his and the target had given him what he needed.

He moved on. Fast, precise, the next target, the next angle. The room pulled along with him the way rooms always got pulled along when Rickles was running at full speed. But near the end of the set, he came back. He looked at Jackson. I want to say something, he said. The quieter voice, the one that meant something true was coming.

I’ve watched your videos. I’ve seen the show you put on. And I want you to know he paused. There is nobody on a stage anywhere in the world right now who does what you do. Nobody. He looked out at the audience. We’ve been lucky enough to have him in our business for 19 years, and I don’t think we fully understand yet what we’ve got.

The room was completely still. Jackson looked at Rickles, that quality in his eyes changing again. Something received, something that had traveled through the stillness and landed where it needed to land. After the dinner, Jackson’s people found Rickles backstage. Michael Jackson wanted to say hello.

Rickles went out to the corridor where Jackson was waiting. Jackson was taller than he expected. They always were. He stood in the corridor in that stillness of his and looked at Rickles with those eyes. The glove joke, he said. Rickles waited. Nobody has ever made a joke about the glove that made me laugh.

A pause. I’ve heard a thousand glove jokes. Rickles looked at him. What made this one different? Rickles asked. Jackson thought about it. You weren’t making fun of it, he said. You were curious about it. He looked at Rickles. Nobody is ever actually curious. They just use it to get a laugh. He paused.

You wanted to know. Rickles stood there. He had been told many things by many people in many corridors outside many ballrooms, but nobody had ever said that to him. Nobody had ever identified the thing underneath the joke with that kind of precision. The curiosity