Josie Stephenson had a school bill to pay and four scrapbooks on her shelf.
She lived in Sudbury, in Suffolk, England. She’d once worked as a journalist. Her son’s school fees were coming due, and money was tight. Then she read something about a young American singer that gave her an idea.
Michael Jackson, she learned, idolized Charlie Chaplin.
If you’re under a certain age, Chaplin was the silent-film star best known as the Little Tramp. Josie had four whole scrapbooks about him, stuffed with photographs, film reviews and press cuttings. So in the late 1970s she offered them to Michael.
She kept the story to herself for decades. She was 70 when she finally told it to the East Anglian Daily Times in 2009, and it was the first time she’d ever talked about it.
At the time, Michael was still the lead singer of his brothers’ group. He was right on the edge of becoming one of the biggest stars in the world. Josie went to meet him at a hotel in London’s West End and ended up in his hotel room.
She wasn’t a fan, and she was honest about it. “I was never into his music,” she said. “At the time I had no idea how talented he was, just that he was extraordinarily famous.”
Then the door opened.
“He was dressed in brilliant white pyjamas and astonishingly, he was wearing a large pith helmet.”
Yes, a pith helmet. That’s the round, hard safari hat you’ve seen on old-time explorers in the jungle. Michael was wearing one indoors, with his pajamas, to talk about a silent-movie comedian.
And he really did want to talk. “He was very knowledgeable about Chaplin, especially for someone so young, and he told me he particularly liked Chaplin’s acrobatics,” Josie said.
If you’ve never seen what he meant, this roller-skating scene, shared by Chaplin’s own official channel, is a perfect taste of the physical comedy young Michael loved.
Charlie Chaplin on roller skates in “Modern Times”
Michael bought all four scrapbooks for about 200 British pounds, money that would help with her son’s school fees. He also gave her some T-shirts and a copy of his latest album.
That should’ve been the end of it. It wasn’t.
Months later, Josie was cooking dinner when the phone rang. “I was cooking dinner when a voice said ‘hi Mrs Stephenson’. I wondered who the heck it was and then he said it was Michael Jackson. I thought someone was having a laugh at first.”
“Having a laugh” is British for playing a joke on someone. But it really was Michael.
“The first call lasted about an hour and we talked about general things like his work and even the weather,” she said. He kept telling her how nice it was to have someone to talk to.
The calls went on for about six months, then stopped without warning. Her family could hardly believe it. “My daughter, Jane, was speechless and her street cred soared.”
Decades on, Josie still thought about the look on his face as he turned those old pages.
“My abiding memory was that he was a lovely lad but his face only ever sparkled when he was looking at the scrapbooks.”