In 1971, Buz Kohan was writing “Goin’ Back to Indiana,” the Jackson 5’s homecoming TV special, and a lot of the work happened around a piano. The group’s 12-year-old lead singer kept turning up next to it.
“Michael used to say, ‘Hey, why don’t we write some songs together?'” Kohan remembered in a 2011 interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “I said, ‘Go away, kid, you bother me.'” Michael didn’t go away. The two struck up a friendship, “a 12-year-old and a grown-up,” as Kohan put it.
Kohan was a good friend for a curious kid to have. He won an Emmy writing for “The Carol Burnett Show,” wrote more than 20 Academy Awards broadcasts and later wrote for “Motown 25.” He and Bill Angelos also wrote the Jacksons’ first act for the MGM Grand, the show where little Janet made her first appearance on stage. She and Randy did a Sonny and Cher routine.
“It was always just such a pleasure to work with him,” Kohan said. “It was just so creative even at 12.” His wife had her own way of putting it. “My wife used to say, ‘Michael, tell the truth, what planet are you from?'” Michael would answer, “I’m from here.” She’d press him anyway. “No, come on, Michael, you can tell, I won’t tell anybody.”
Kohan called him “an otherworldly spirit sometimes” and said he was “so intense about learning.” Michael wanted to hear about everyone Kohan had worked with. “You worked with Bing Crosby, tell me about Bing Crosby, what was he like?” he’d ask. “Did you ever meet Mahalia Jackson?” Fred Astaire came up too. By Kohan’s account, Michael would be on the phone for hours with Katharine Hepburn, Gregory Peck came to dinner all the time and Marlon Brando gave him acting lessons.
But Michael’s biggest hero wasn’t a singer or a movie star. “His idol was Walt Disney,” Kohan said. And one day Michael came to him bursting with news. “He says, ‘I found her.’ I said, ‘Who’d you find, Michael?’ He says, ‘I found the lady.’ I said, ‘What lady, Michael?'”
Kohan tells the whole thing on camera. Listen for how he slips back into the questions he kept asking Michael that day.
Buz Kohan tells the story of Michael and “the lady” (Television Academy Foundation interview)
This is the Television Academy Foundation’s official interview with Kohan, recorded in Los Angeles on Sept. 1, 2011. He talks about meeting Michael at about 48:43, his wife’s “what planet” question at 53:48 and the lady at about 55:10.
So who was she?
She was the woman who gave Walt Disney a massage at his studio every day at 5 o’clock. Michael explained it to Kohan himself: “There was a lady who used to give Walt Disney massages every day at 5 o’clock out at the studio, and when he’d have his drink and she’d give him a massage, she’d hear everything that was going on. She’s in a home, right near Disneyland. I found her. I’m going out there.”
He meant it. “He went out, he found her, he talked to this woman for eight hours and got every story about Walt Disney that she had,” Kohan said.
It wasn’t the only time Michael went to great lengths to learn something. Kohan once put him in touch with Paul, a researcher who tracked down film footage. Michael asked him for “every shot from every movie ever made of a car chase.” “He was a sponge,” Kohan said. “He wanted to know why they were great.” Paul came back with “like 50 hours of car chases,” Kohan said, “and he’d sit and watch them all.”