The morning after Michael Jackson first showed the world that smooth backward slide on live TV, his phone rang at home. He picked it up and heard a voice he knew from a hundred old movies. It was Fred Astaire.
If you’re under a certain age the name might not mean much. But to Michael it meant everything. Fred Astaire was the elegant song-and-dance man who lit up Hollywood musicals in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, gliding across the screen in a top hat and tails. Michael had studied him since he was a boy.
Astaire had just seen the “Motown 25” TV special, the NBC show where Michael performed “Billie Jean” in front of a live crowd. “I watched the special last night,” Astaire told him, “I taped it and I watched it again this morning.” Then he said something Michael never forgot. “You’re an angry dancer,” Astaire said. “I’m the same way.” Michael said that call meant more to him than almost anything.
Here’s the performance Astaire sat and watched twice.
The “Billie Jean” performance that made Fred Astaire pick up the phone
But the phone call wasn’t the end of it.
Some time later Astaire invited Michael over to his house. Michael wrote about the visit in his 1988 book, and the way he tells it, the compliments kept coming until he actually blushed. Astaire wanted to go back through the whole “Billie Jean” number with him “step by step,” like two craftsmen comparing notes.
Then another guest arrived. Hermes Pan, the choreographer who had dreamed up Astaire’s famous dance routines in the movies for decades, came by to join them.
And that’s when the afternoon turned around. These two giants of Hollywood dance, the very men Michael had grown up idolizing, wanted to know how he did the move everyone was talking about. So Michael showed them. He walked his own heroes through the step he’d unveiled on that stage. “I showed them how to Moonwalk,” he wrote, plain as that.
Michael said he felt like he’d been “inducted into an informal fraternity of dancers.” The boy who used to watch these men on a screen was now one of them, in their eyes.
His “Billie Jean” was up for an Emmy that year and didn’t win. Michael didn’t seem to mind. Astaire’s words, he said, were the only reward he needed. (Another old legend, Gene Kelly, stopped by his home around that time too.)
This fan edit sets Michael next to Astaire so you can see the thing the old master recognized in him.
Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire, their moves side by side
Astaire passed away in 1987, a few years after that visit. By then he’d told plenty of people what he thought of the young man who’d knocked on his door. Play the first clip and you’ll understand exactly what he saw.