Michael Jackson - Moonwalk

What one wishes is to be touched by truth and to be able to interpret that truth so that one may use what one is feeling and experiencing, be it despair or joy, in a way that will add meaning to ones life and will hopefully touch others as well.

This is art in its highest form. Those moments of enlightenment are what I continue to live for.

Michael Jackson

. Photograph by Stephen Vaughan. Also Thriller photograph in first color insert by Stephen Vaughan. Copyright 1983 by MJJ Productions, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA Inc. The dedication page photograph of Fred Astaire. Copyright 1946 by Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA Inc. The photograph of Michael and E.T. by Dick Zimmerman. 1982 by Universal Pictures, a Division of Universal City Studios, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA Inc. The photograph of Michael and Frank Sinatra by Ed Thrasher. 1984 Bristol Productions and Qwest Records. Photograph of Michael and Katharine Hepburn. Photograph from the Pepsi commercial by Ralph Nelson. 1984 Pepsi-Cola Company. Photograph of Michael and Sophia Loren.

NEW AFTERWORD TO THE 2009 RE-ISSUED EDITION

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Shaye Areheart were
Michael Jacksons editors at Doubleday Publishing Company,
which published Moonwalk in 1988.

Michael Jackson had an infectious laugh and a wonderful sense of humor. When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and I visited him for the first time at his home in Encino in 1983, he was a gracious and charming host. Waiting with him to say hello were his mother, Katherine, and his sisters, La Toya and Janet, looking as young and fresh as high school students. Michael was dressed in what I would come to regard as his everyday attireblack loafers, white socks, black slacks, a white (or sometimes blue) oxford long-sleeved shirt over a white T-shirt. He was sweet and funny and a little shy, but it was obvious that he was honored to have Jackie in his home and pleased that she and I wanted him to write a book.

We talked and nibbled on the spread of food Mrs. Jackson had put out for us, and then Michael asked if wed like a tour of the house and the grounds. We saw his trophies and plaques, the gold records and many photographs of Michael with people like Fred Astaire, James Brown, and Elizabeth Taylor, and, well, seemingly anyone who was famous in America in 1983. Michael had impeccable manners and he wasnt in the least boastful about any of this, but you could tell he was prouda little boy from Gary, Indiana, had managed all of this!

The last room we toured had a very large glass terrarium with a lid on it. It was on a low table, and it was hard to see what was inside. Jackie and I were looking around, admiring some very beautiful birds in cages, oblivious to what Michael was up to, when suddenly he turned from the terrarium and said with a sweet smile, Here, Shaye, you want to hold Muscles? Languishing across his outstretched hands was a very pretty boa constrictor. I took it. It felt like damp silk and, much to my surprise, began to move sideways, so that I was in danger of dropping it. I exclaimed to that effect, and Michael protectively retrieved his snake with a look of abject disappointment on his face. It was only much later, when he teased me about it, that I realized he was hopingwildly hopingfor a shriek from me and, maybe, a hysterical dash out of the room. He was a kid at heartthen and always.

Michael was making the music video for his song Thriller while we were in Los Angeles, and he invited us to come see what he was up to. We went out to the studio the next day and met John Landis, who was directing the video, and saw the set, which was riddled with the holes that the ghouls would emerge from. Michael and John began joking about the insurance mess they would be in if we got hurt, and suddenly we were being ushered to Michaels trailer, where we began to talk about what the book could and should be. He was a very visual person and he thought he might like it to be a coffee-table picture book with a lot of text. We werent set on a particular format so we were open to discussing anything and everything. It was then that Michael asked Jackie if she would be willing to write a foreword to the book once it was completed, and she agreed. We went back to New York with a book deal in hand, and the adventure began in earnest.

Over the four years that I intermittently worked and traveled with Michael while he was creating his book, Moonwalk, I saw his delight in the world, his fresh perspective on what most of us would call reality. Michael was an artist, and artists are not like us; they dont want to work in an office, to live conventionally, to never ruffle feathers.

Michael lived music, he breathed music. While walking down the stairs or riding in a car, he would open his mouth and a bit of a song he was working on, or a melody that was running through his head, would rise to the listeners ears, and all within hearing range would feel quite amazed to be in the company of someone who was so obviously a musical genius.

Michael, we all know, was deprived of a childhood, and it haunted him and kept him in Neverland. He realized how important and special childhood was, even as those of us who were lucky enough to have one did not. He had lived in the land of the grown-ups for too many years, and he saw with wonder and a growing uneasiness that adults frequently live in a treacherous world of brutality, backbiting, and fear. Having been introduced to it too soon, Michael never wanted to live that way. He was deprived of many of the most basic aspects of childhood, and so instead of playing and goofing off, he worked. He traveled from nightclub to nightclub, from venue to venue, from a hundred inebriated people in a smoke-filled room to the Ed Sullivan Show. This was no childhood; this was hard work, and pressure on the shoulders of a little boy with a gorgeous voice and the electric stage persona of someone five times his age.

When he was old enough and financially secure enough, Michael Jackson created his own world, a place where there was peace and kindness, where every candy imaginable was available in dispensers that dont take money, where a movie theater with popcorn and soda pop sat excitingly empty, the projectionist waiting to hear your wishes, a place where chimps dressed in sailor suits and fun was the only accepted currency. Michael loved being in the company of children, because, as he told me many times, Children dont lie to you. Children are pure and innocent and good. Being with children is like being blessed, like being with angels.

Jackie and I asked Michael to write about his life, because even at the age he was when we initiated the project, he had spent almost twenty years in show business. He was a great performer, a singer, a songwriter, and a dancer whom Fred Astaire admired. What did this amazing young man have to say, what stories did he want to tell, what had he experienced? As it turned out, Michael had been in the publics eye for so long that he had become very protective of those things his fans could not see, did not know. He had been written about at every stage of his life. Facts had been telegraphed, as had falsehoods. He liked the idea that he could set the record straight in his own book, in his own words, but, too, there was an overriding desire to leave some things for himself and for those people he loved the most.

On our second trip to L.A. to see Michael, we brought along the designer J.C. Suares and a hodgepodge of art supplies and big sheets of drawing paper. We stood around Michaels huge dining room table and he talked about what hed like the book to be. Michael, who loved to draw, and J.C. sketched out pages, and we all talked about the endless possibilities.