Dodger Stadium was packed, and somewhere high above the field sat the one guest who had Michael Jackson nervous. It was late 1984. The Victory Tour, his giant stadium run with his brothers, had come home to Los Angeles for some of its last shows, and Michael had made sure Elizabeth Taylor had seats.
She didn’t come alone. “I brought 30 people,” she told Larry King on CNN in 2006.
According to Donald Bogle’s 2016 book “Elizabeth and Michael,” Michael had already sent her admiring notes and had been looking for a way to meet her. He arranged dozens of VIP tickets for her party, and he knew she was out there watching. He could handle a stadium full of strangers. This one guest was different.
Then the news reached him. Elizabeth Taylor and her whole group had gone home halfway through the show.
Michael took it hard. He was sure one of the biggest stars in Hollywood had walked out on him, and he wanted to know what he’d done wrong. The next day he picked up the phone and called her himself.
“Michael heard that I had left halfway through, and called me the next day, and was like in tears,” Taylor told Larry King.
Here’s what he didn’t know. She hadn’t left because of him. She’d left because she couldn’t see him.
“I went to a concert, and I couldn’t see a thing. I was way up in the… well, it was a stadium,” she said. “And I brought 30 people, and we couldn’t even hear.”
Bogle writes that the seats Michael arranged were in a glass-enclosed VIP section with a poor view of the stage. The VIP treatment had backfired. Taylor and her friends had spent half the night straining to follow a show they could barely see or hear.
So she told him the truth. “I hadn’t walked out. I just couldn’t see anything.”
Neither of them hung up. “And then we talked on the phone for about three hours,” she said, “and from there on in, we talked more and more on the phone.” Bogle writes that they spoke every day after that, and that “something magical happened during those phone conversations.”
The calls led to visits. “Then we met, and spent more and more time with each other, and just became really good friends,” Taylor said. “Told each other everything.”
Elizabeth Taylor’s 2006 sit-down with Larry King
This is a fan upload of the full May 2006 episode of CNN’s “Larry King Live,” the interview Taylor’s quotes in this story come from. It’s the whole show and runs about 36 minutes. It covers far more than Michael, so give yourself time.
People often asked what a movie legend in her fifties and a pop star in his twenties could have in common. Taylor had a short answer for Larry: “We’re very much alike.” She’d been acting in movies since she was a girl, and Michael had been singing for a living since he was a little boy. “Well, working at the age of 9 is not a childhood,” she said.
Michael saw it the same way. “I can really relax with her because we’ve lived the same life and experienced the same thing,” he said, in a line Bogle quotes in his book.
Elizabeth Taylor tells Johnny Carson what Michael meant to her
In this fan upload, Taylor is talking about Michael with Johnny Carson from the very first second. “We became friends and he’s like my brother,” she says, and she adds that they’re “both shy.” Two show business children, she tells Johnny, who “had no childhood to speak of.”