In October 1987, Michael Jackson was about the most famous person on the planet. The King of Pop was in the middle of his huge “Bad” world tour, and between the shows in Japan and the shows in Australia he stopped in Hong Kong for a few weeks of rest.
The local press knew he was coming. Photographers packed the airport, cameras up, waiting for the one picture everybody wanted.
They got a picture. The next morning it ran on a front page under the words “Michael Jackson arrives in Hong Kong,” at least the way one man remembers it. The only problem, he says, is that it wasn’t Michael.
That man goes by Dr Penguin. He’s a Moroccan-born entertainer and magician who worked the tables at a Hong Kong restaurant back in those days. By his account, Michael didn’t want to walk into that wall of cameras, so a little trick got set up.
A singer named Peggy Johnson dressed up as Michael. Dr Penguin says he walked her right through the airport, calling out “Quick, Michael, run,” loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. The photographers chased after her and snapped away. And while all that noise was going on, the real Michael slipped out another way.
So the paper printed the decoy and never knew it.
That alone would make a good story. What happened next is the sweeter part. Dr Penguin says he and Michael ended up sitting and talking for about an hour and a half, and almost none of it was about music. They talked card tricks. They talked about the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers, those old comedy acts Michael had loved since he was a kid.
When the conversation was over, Michael asked him something nobody would have guessed. He wanted Dr Penguin to be his tour guide while he was in town.
So a restaurant magician spent part of those weeks quietly showing the most famous man in the world around Hong Kong.
Michael kept a low profile the whole trip. He went by the Shaw Brothers film studio, the legendary home of Hong Kong movies, where a publicist named Ann Tsang got to meet him. She didn’t describe some demanding superstar. She remembered him as “humble, soft-spoken with no demands.”
Remember, this is Dr Penguin’s own telling of the airport switch, and it’s the kind of story that gets better every time it’s told. But he’s stuck to it for years, and the picture it paints feels right. The biggest star in the world, slipping past a crowd of cameras so he could go learn a few card tricks from a man called Penguin.
No film crew followed any of it. What’s left are the photos from those Hong Kong weeks in 1987, a rested-looking Michael away from the stage, finally getting a little quiet.