The lake was in New Hampshire, and in the summer of 1980 Michael Jackson spent more than a week on its shore, watching other people act.
Jane Fonda was there making “On Golden Pond” with Katharine Hepburn and her father, Henry Fonda. Michael had asked if he could come. “He was interested in becoming a movie actor,” Fonda told CNN’s Piers Morgan in 2011. He’d made “The Wiz” two years earlier, and now he wanted to see how a film got made from the inside.
He was quiet on the set. Doug McKeon, then 14 and playing Billy Ray in the film, ended up next to him at a crew lunch. Fonda introduced him as “her friend, Michael,” McKeon told author Chris Cadman, and Michael “sat and listened to our conversation rather than join in.” A unit driver, Dick Sutton, later told New Hampshire’s WMUR that he taught Michael to bait a hook. “He’d never fished before. First time fishing.”
Away from the cameras, he talked. “We’d just talk, talk, talk about everything,” Michael told Interview magazine in October 1982. “It was the greatest education for me.” Fonda’s version, to Time in 1984: “We talked and talked and talked. His intelligence is instinctual and emotional, like a child’s.”
Why Jane saw her father in him
She noticed how quickly Michael warmed to Henry, and she thought she knew why. “Dad was also painfully self conscious and shy in life, and he really only felt comfortable when he was behind the mask of a character,” she said in a 1984 interview. “He could liberate himself only when he was being someone else. That’s a lot like Michael.”
That idea stayed with her. In the early 1980s she was driving with Michael one day and said out loud what she’d been turning over: “God, Michael, I wish I could find a movie I could produce for you.” Then, she said, “suddenly I knew.”
So which role was it? “I said, ‘I know what you’ve got to do. It’s “Peter Pan,”‘” Fonda recalled.
She wasn’t ready for how he took it. “Tears welled up in his eyes and he said, ‘Why did you say that?’ with this ferocity. I said, ‘I realize you’re Peter Pan.’ And he started to cry and said, ‘You know, all over the walls of my room are pictures of Peter Pan. I’ve read everything that Barrie wrote. I totally identify with Peter Pan, the lost boy of Never-Neverland.'”
Biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli tells the same story in his 1991 book “Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness,” down to the tears and the pictures on his walls. Fonda’s account lives in print, in that 1984 interview and in Taraborrelli’s book. Her later TV interviews about that summer cover other moments, so there’s no clip of this one.
What Peter Pan meant to him
It wasn’t a passing fancy. By March 1984, Time reported that Michael “has spoken often about doing a movie musical of Peter Pan.” Fonda could already see it: “Oh, I can see him leading lost children into a world of fantasy and magic. From Gary, straight on to Barrie!”
The movie never got made. Fonda did play a part in what came after, though. She had a ranch north of Santa Barbara, and Michael came to visit. “I was walking him around,” she told Piers Morgan. “It’s how he was introduced to that area, where he eventually bought Neverland.”
He bought the ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley in 1988 and named it after Peter’s island, the place where nobody has to grow up.