On the night of February 16, 1997, photographers packed the sidewalk outside the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor, the movie star who’d been famous since she was a little girl, was arriving for her own birthday party. Michael Jackson came with her as her escort, and the two of them walked into the theater holding hands while the cameras flashed all around them.
The party came a few days early. Her 65th birthday was February 27, but nobody was going to wait. This wasn’t a quiet dinner with a cake, either. Tickets cost $1,000 each, and the money went to her foundation helping people living with AIDS. Hugh Grant and David Copperfield were among the stars who turned out, and the whole night was filmed for a TV special on ABC called “Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life.”
The full birthday special from the Pantages Theatre
Michael’s part of the night comes about 42 minutes in.
The show was a long love letter to her life, with photos and film clips going back to her childhood roles and songs from some of the biggest names in music. Michael could have stopped at being her date for the night. He’d already done the hard part by walking her past all those cameras.
But he had planned something else.
Later in the evening, the lights went down and Michael came out on his own. He wore a plain white shirt and stood at a simple microphone stand, with no dancers and no big set behind him. Taylor sat in the audience among her guests, and the TV cameras kept cutting back to her seat.
The song he sang was called “Elizabeth, I Love You.” Michael wrote it for her, and her name was right there in the title. It wasn’t a pop single built for the radio. It was a slow, tender ballad, and one writer who studies Michael’s work has described the performance as an echo of the golden era of Hollywood musicals, the very studio world where Taylor grew up.
You can see what it meant to her. As he sang, she smiled up at the stage, and she applauded from her seat along with the rest of the theater.
What makes the moment even rarer is what happened to the song afterward. Michael never released it on any of his albums, and that night was reportedly the only time he ever sang it in public. Unless you were in the Pantages that night or watching ABC, you never heard it at all.
Michael sings his song for Elizabeth Taylor
The clip runs just under five minutes. Keep an eye on the cutaways to Taylor in the crowd, because her face shows how the gift landed. She’d won two Oscars and had been a star for more than 50 years by then, and a room full of famous friends had come out to honor her. The one who wrote her a song was the friend holding her hand at the door.