Back in 1980, a young Michael Jackson talked his way onto one of the most famous movie sets in Hollywood. He wasn’t there to perform, just to watch and learn.
The film was “On Golden Pond,” and the person who brought him along was Jane Fonda. Fonda is the Oscar-winning actress who starred in that movie beside her own father, the legendary Henry Fonda. She and Michael had become good friends, and she let him spend several days hanging around the set.
“Every day I would bring him to the set,” Fonda has said.
There was just one problem. The other big star of the movie didn’t want him there.
That star was Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn was one of the grandest names in film history, a four-time Academy Award winner known for being sharp-tongued and fiercely private. At first she wasn’t happy about this quiet young singer hanging around while she tried to work.
And then she changed her mind.
Instead of shooing him off, Hepburn started pulling up a chair for Michael between takes. She told him stories from her long life in the movies, and he hung on every word. He wanted to be a movie star himself, Fonda said, and here was a Hollywood legend coaching him for free.
“Every story embedded a lesson,” Fonda put it.
One of those stories stayed with Michael for the rest of his life.
Hepburn told him about Laurette Taylor, a stage actress many people once called the finest of her generation. Taylor gave a performance in the play “The Glass Menagerie” that left audiences stunned. But Hepburn had watched her over the years, and at some point she felt the old spark was gone. The magic that used to pour off that stage just wasn’t there anymore.
Why? Hepburn boiled it down to four small words.
“She wasn’t hungry anymore.”
That was the lesson. Stay hungry, and never decide you’ve already made it. Michael was barely into his twenties, and he carried it with him through every album and show that came after.
The two stayed friends for years. Biographer A. Scott Berg later wrote in his book “Kate Remembered” that Hepburn once had Michael over for dinner and made him take his sunglasses off the moment he walked in. Michael had a request of his own that night. He asked her to introduce him to Greta Garbo, the famously reclusive movie star he’d always wanted to meet.
The friendship even had its moment in public. At the Grammy Awards in February 1984, on the record-breaking night when “Thriller” swept the show, Michael slipped off his dark glasses on live television and told the room who he was doing it for.
Michael takes off his sunglasses on live TV and says Hepburn told him to
“Well Katharine Hepburn, who is a dear friend of mine, she told me I should and I’m doing it for her,” he said.
No real video of Fonda telling the set story has turned up, so the summer of 1980 lives mostly in old photos. A shy young singer pulling his chair close to one of the toughest legends in the business, soaking up the one rule she swore by. He was still chasing it decades later.