Celine Dion had a decision to make in the middle of her own show. Michael Jackson was in the audience at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and she couldn’t work out whether to tell anyone.
Was she aware of him the whole time? “Absolutely. You cannot do otherwise,” she told CNN’s Larry King in 2009. “I was questioning myself through the whole show. Can I announce him? Do I give him his private time?” Every instinct she had said yes. “Should I? I want to do it so much.”
She went with her gut. “And I did announce him,” she said. The moment she said “ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson is with us tonight,” the room exploded. “I thought people were going to jump off the balcony,” she said. “The people went crazy.”
For Celine, that night closed a loop that started in her childhood home in Quebec. “I remember being in this, in my house when I was very, very young and having his posters above my bedroom,” she told King. Michael had been her idol “all my life,” and she didn’t only want his records. “My goal was to be maybe doing the same show business world as him,” she said. The Las Vegas Sun reported in 2011 that watching Michael on TV as a young girl was what inspired the French-speaking singer to speak and sing in English.
She got her wish. In time she ended up on the same record company as Michael, something she called a privilege. Somewhere along the way she finally met him, “a long, long time ago,” as she put it, and the fan in her showed up that day. “I was so thrilled and nervous when I had the privilege of meeting with him,” she said. “He was so kind.”
The Las Vegas visit came during “A New Day…”, the show Celine played at the Colosseum from 2003 to 2007. And the part of it she kept coming back to happened away from the crowd. “He came backstage,” she told King. “We spent about an hour together and he had a lot of questions for me.”
They weren’t the questions of a visiting legend being polite. Michael wanted to understand how she did it. “I want to know how it is to be in Las Vegas, how it is, Celine, to sing every night here,” she recalled him asking. “Is it difficult? Is it difficult to sing here every night? Is it demanding?”
In another 2009 interview, with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, she told the same story. Michael “wanted to know how it was to perform night after night in Las Vegas,” she said, and “how was it for living there.” It caught her off guard. “I was very surprised, because I had questions for him, I am a big fan.” She’d said much the same to King: “I wanted to know so much from him.” Then she added, “I was amazed to have him in my dressing room.”
And that nervous first meeting had left her with something she never let go of. “He gave me his autograph,” she told King. “And I have a hat of his with his autograph. And it always has an amazing meaning to me.” It was a hat that had belonged to Michael, with his signature on it, and she still had it.
When Celine returned to the Colosseum in 2011 with a new show, she paid tribute to him with a medley. According to the Las Vegas Sun, cellists played bits of “Smooth Criminal,” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller,” and she sang “Man in the Mirror.” In those early 2011 shows she pointed out the seat near the stage where Michael had sat and told the audience, “All I could do was stare at him the whole show.” A spotlight was trained on that seat.