On June 16, 1976, CBS put a new variety show on the air called “The Jacksons.” The brothers sang with Janet, La Toya and Rebbie, and the family played sketches between the songs. Michael was 17. The woman staging the dance numbers was Anita Mann.
She came to the job with a long list of famous names. The Television Academy Foundation credits her on Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special, as assistant choreographer on Lucille Ball’s “The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy,” and as choreographer of Cher’s variety show. When she sat down for the Foundation’s oral history series, “The Interviews,” in 2018, she was asked about the Jacksons. “I got the job and it was 1976, I believe,” she said.
“In a class in outer space by himself”
Her verdict on Michael came quickly. “Michael was in a class in outer space by himself,” she told the Foundation. She put him in the same breath as the biggest stars she’d worked with: “it’s like Elvis, Cher, Lucy and Michael Jackson.”
Then she went further. “I never choreographed Baryshnikov. I think I once did something for Rudolf Nureyev, but for pure talent he was the number one person I’ve ever choreographed.”
She called him “a dream, a dream person to choreograph” and said “there was nothing Michael Jackson could not do.”
What she wouldn’t do was claim his moves. A weekly show meant new numbers all the time, and she says they built them side by side. “Every number that we did was a collaboration together,” she said. “I would never take credit for the steps that Michael brought to the routine.”
Two of those numbers stayed with her. One was “I Shot the Sheriff.” The other was “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and for that one, she said, “I did a tap number.”
Extra lessons at the family home
Long days of rehearsing and taping didn’t use up the teenager’s appetite for dance. He wanted extra dance lessons, and he wanted them at the family home.
So whose routines did she teach him?
“Michael asked me to go to his home … every night, filming or after work, whether we were rehearsing, and we put on Fred Astaire movies and I taught him,” she said.
Anita had an unusual gift that made those lessons work. She didn’t need to study a routine for days. “I could watch them and learn the routines right away,” she said, “and I taught Michael every routine Fred Astaire ever did in the film.”
After a full day on the set, a 17-year-old Michael Jackson sat at the family home with Fred Astaire on the screen, and his choreographer turned the films into lessons.
Anita Mann on choreographing Michael Jackson on “The Jacksons”
Watch for the list of names she runs through before she gets to Michael.
This is the Television Academy Foundation’s own clip from her 2018 interview. She says Michael was “in a class in outer space by himself” at about 0:16. She calls him “the number one person I’ve ever choreographed” at about 1:18 and tells the story of the lessons at the family home at about 2:08.
“The Jacksons” ran for 12 episodes on CBS, and the last one aired on March 9, 1977. Mann’s credits also include “Solid Gold,” and she won an Emmy for choreographing the Miss America Pageant. Right after the Astaire story in her interview, she added one more line about the dancing she did best. “Tap is not easy,” she said, “but tap is my thing.”