Evan Ross was on the couch at “Watch What Happens Live” in September 2018, with his wife, singer Ashlee Simpson, sitting right next to him. The two had married in 2014. Then the Michael Jackson question came. What was his favorite memory of Michael?
Evan’s problem wasn’t remembering one. It was picking one. “There’s been a ton,” he said.
He’s Diana Ross’s youngest son, born in 1988, and he grew up to be an actor and singer himself, with roles in “ATL” and two “Hunger Games” movies. Ten years before he was born, his mom played Dorothy to Michael’s Scarecrow in the movie “The Wiz.” The Jacksons “were friends of mine and we grew up together,” he told PopCrush in a 2015 interview.
In that same interview he owned up to a mix-up from those years. “I used to talk to Michael on the phone and I would think it was mom because they sounded kind of alike,” he said. So when the phone rang at the Ross house, it could have been either one of them, and young Evan couldn’t always tell.
It came up because the interviewer said Evan’s voice on his song “How to Live Alone” sounded like Michael’s. Evan had a theory about that. “I really think it’s more that I sound like mom and mom and Michael sound a lot alike,” he said. Asked to name his biggest musical inspirations, he didn’t have to think long: “My mom and Michael Jackson, for sure.”
On Andy Cohen’s show, Evan started with the names Michael had for him. Michael called him “Applehead” and “Doo Doo,” he said, and “everybody that’s a part of our young crew knows Applehead and Doo Doo.”
Then he got to the memory he’d picked. It came from the time when, in his words, he “was just starting to go to clubs.” Evan was a young man heading out for the night, and Michael was on the phone with him. Michael had a request, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from Michael Jackson.
Here’s Evan telling it himself. Listen for what Michael asks him to do with the phone, and how Michael answers every time Evan checks in.
Evan Ross shares his favorite Michael Jackson memory on “Watch What Happens Live”
This is the show’s own upload, about two minutes long. The question comes at about 0:48, Evan starts his answer at about 1:01, and he gets to Michael’s request at about 1:18.
Michael didn’t want Evan to hang up. He wanted to hear the club.
He asked Evan to “put the phone on the counter” so he could listen to the same music Evan was hearing. Evan did it. “So I go to the club, put him on speaker, and he would listen to what was playing in the club,” he told Andy.
So there was Michael Jackson, on speaker, sitting on a counter in a club, listening to whatever song came on next. Evan kept picking the phone back up to see if Michael was done. He never was. Every time, Michael gave him the same answer: “No, I want to keep listening.”
Evan finished with a quick verdict on the man on the other end of that line. “He was one of the most amazing people,” Evan said, about the friend who’d nicknamed him Applehead.