Michael Jackson spent much of his life surrounded by bodyguards, assistants and screaming crowds, so ordinary life was something he rarely experienced. Longtime friend Frank Cascio said Michael would sometimes escape to his family’s home in New Jersey without security or nannies because it gave him a chance to simply be another person in the house.
And Michael apparently did not want to be treated like a guest. Cascio remembered him helping his mother vacuum the carpet and clean around the house. His family also recalled him helping with everyday chores and even taking out the garbage. Things most people considered boring seemed to give Michael a small taste of the normal life fame had taken away from him.
Frank Cascio Talks About the Michael Jackson He Knew
Cascio had known Michael since childhood and later worked as his assistant and manager. In 2009, he told Good Morning America that Michael seemed most like himself when he visited the family without the usual machinery surrounding his celebrity. They could clean the house, eat dinner or quietly sneak out to local stores in disguises.
That desire for normality also appears throughout Cascio’s later memoir, My Friend Michael. The entire friendship offered Michael something his extraordinary life rarely provided: an ordinary family environment where he was not constantly treated as the King of Pop. ABC later described Cascio’s memories as showing a Michael who could happily turn up at the family home and start cleaning.
It is a strange contrast when you consider what Michael’s normal working life looked like. He was the artist behind Thriller, “Billie Jean” and “Bad,” performing for enormous crowds and living with worldwide recognition almost everywhere he went. Yet vacuuming a carpet or helping around someone’s house could give him something all that success could not.
Michael Jackson became one of the most famous entertainers who ever lived, but perhaps that was exactly why ordinary things mattered so much to him. Frank Cascio remembered a man who could leave the superstar world outside the door and enjoy cleaning, joking and spending time with a family that treated him normally. Watch Cascio’s interview and hear about the Michael Jackson his friends saw when there was no stage and no crowd.