Michael Jackson was only 11 when the Jackson 5 left Gary, Indiana for California. He was the littlest brother with the biggest voice, already singing lead. You’d think a boy that age, in a band about to blow up, would spend all his time in a recording studio. He didn’t.
He spent most of his days at Diana Ross’s house.
Diana Ross was Motown’s brightest star back then. She was the lead singer of the Supremes and one of the most famous women in music, and when the Jackson brothers first signed she took them under her wing. She grew especially close to Michael. Berry Gordy, the man who built Motown, lived right down the same street in Beverly Hills. So Michael, a long way from home and still a kid, spent his days at Diana’s place and his nights at Berry’s.
Almost every day the two of them would slip out together. Just Diana and Michael. And they weren’t heading to a stage or a studio.
For years people figured Diana was coaching the boy to sing. That isn’t what those afternoons were about at all.
They went out to buy pencils and paint. Then they’d come home and draw and paint together, and on the days they didn’t feel like drawing, Diana took him to art museums. She walked him past the work of Michelangelo, the Italian master who painted the Sistine Chapel, and Edgar Degas, the French painter famous for his dancers. In his own book Michael kept it simple.
“Diana loved art and encouraged me to appreciate it too,” he wrote. The two of them would “go out almost every day, just the two of us, and buy pencils and paint. When we weren’t drawing or painting, we’d go to museums.”
That gift stuck with him. Michael drew and sketched for the rest of his life, and he never forgot who handed him the habit.
“You wouldn’t think a big star like Diana would take the time to teach a kid to paint, to give him an education in art, but she did and I loved her for it. I still do.”
Then he grew up and had kids of his own, and he passed the whole thing down. His daughter Paris, sitting with talk show host Oprah Winfrey back in 2010, remembered the quiet days with her father, the ones away from the crowds and the cameras. One of the things they shared was art.
“And sometimes,” Paris said, “he would take me to an art museum because we both loved art.”
The same pencils, the same museums, a little girl holding her dad’s hand the way a little boy once held Diana’s. He didn’t pick that up from a voice coach or a record label. He got it from a friend who thought a kid deserved more than rehearsals, and he carried it all the way to his own front door.
No film crew ever followed Michael and Diana on those trips, and the museum days were just for them. What’s left are the photographs: young Michael beside Diana Ross in those early California years, and the drawings he kept making long after.