On October 24, 1978, “The Wiz” had its premiere in New York. Diana Ross was Dorothy. Michael Jackson, 20 years old and making his first movie, was the Scarecrow. Somewhere in that crowd was an 11-year-old boy who had come with his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.
The boy was Anderson Cooper. There was a family connection: his mother had been married to Sidney Lumet, the film’s director, from 1956 to 1963.
Thirty-four years later, Cooper had his own daytime talk show, “Anderson,” and Janet Jackson was his guest. In a segment the show posted in February 2012, he turned the interview around. “I’ve actually got a funny story which I don’t think you know,” he told her.
He set it up step by step. “My mom had been married to a guy named Sidney, who was a famous director, who directed ‘The Wiz,'” he said. “I went to the premiere of the movie ‘The Wiz,’ which of course Diana Ross was in, and Michael Jackson was in. Michael played the Scarecrow.”
Then he got to the ride. “I got to ride in a car with Michael Jackson when I was like 10 or 11 to the after-party at Studio 54,” he said. He joked about it right away, wondering out loud why his mom thought that was a good outing for a kid his age.
It’s an odd picture if you know Michael’s history. By the fall of 1978 he’d been famous for most of a decade. The Jackson 5’s first four singles had all gone to No. 1 back in 1970, and the group had even had its own Saturday morning cartoon.
So here’s the part Cooper figured Janet hadn’t heard.
“I rode in the car with Michael Jackson. I had no idea who Michael Jackson was,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t know this.” Nobody filled him in until the following day. “It was only the next day that they told me,” he said, and then it clicked for him: “That was Janet’s brother.”
He did know Janet, though. She was on the CBS sitcom “Good Times” in those years, playing Penny. “Had I known that he was Janet’s brother, I would have been so excited, because I knew you from ‘Good Times,'” he told her.
The boy didn’t know the name, but he still had an opinion. “I distinctly remember watching him dance … and thinking he’s a really good dancer, he should go into this,” Cooper said.
He told the story again on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in May 2016. TIME reported that he rode there that night with his mother and Michael, and quoted the same memory in slightly different words: “I turned to the person next to me and said, ‘He’s really good at that; he should pursue it.'”
Anderson Cooper tells Janet Jackson the story on his show (2012)
This is the official upload from the show’s own channel, and the whole 1:17 clip is the story. He starts it in the first seconds, and he gets to watching Michael dance at about 1:02.
The hunch was right. “Off the Wall” came out in August 1979, ten months after the premiere. Its producer was Quincy Jones, who had first worked with Michael on the music for “The Wiz.”