Kenny Rogers had a rule for the famous faces who came to sit for his camera. Keep it short. Get in, get the picture, let them go.
By the mid-1980s, the man behind “The Gambler” and “Lady” had a second career most fans never knew about. He was a serious photographer, and he was putting together a book of portraits of his famous friends. It came out in 1987 as “Your Friends and Mine,” with Lucille Ball and Elizabeth Taylor among the stars inside, according to Artnet.
He made every one of them the same deal. “I promised everybody they’d be in and out in 15 minutes,” he later told Dan Rather on AXS TV’s “The Big Interview,” as quoted by Whiskey Riff in 2025.
The call to Michael
Kenny and Michael already knew each other. In 1985 they’d both sung on “We Are the World,” and Larry King brought that up when he spoke to Kenny on CNN in 2009.
On that call with King, Kenny remembered phoning Michael about the book. “I did a book called ‘Your Friends and Mine.’ It’s a photography book,” he said. “And I called him.” He told Michael he’d “only be here 15 minutes.”
Michael said yes. The session reportedly took place in early 1986, according to the MJ Ultimate Archive, a fan-run timeline of Michael’s life. It was the same deal everybody else got: a quick session, a few frames and out the door.
The pictures Kenny took
Kenny was proud of what came out of that day. He told Dan Rather he’d caught a first. “I shot the first pictures of him with the hat,” he said. “And they’re beautiful pictures, some no one’s ever seen before,” he told Rather.
But the photos aren’t what Kenny talked about most when Michael’s name came up. It was the clock.
So how long did Michael stay?
Not 15 minutes. “He stayed eight hours,” Kenny told Dan Rather.
He told Larry King the same thing in 2009. “And he was there for eight hours. He stayed there and wanted to chat and talk. And we took pictures.”
So what filled all that time? “We sat and talked,” Kenny said on “The Big Interview.”
Kenny had a theory about why. He’d seen the same thing once before, with another singer whose fame kept him behind closed doors.
“It’s like Elvis, when you get to that status, you don’t have a lot of people you can just talk to,” he told Rather. “He couldn’t go anywhere. He couldn’t be a person.”
Kenny said Elvis had once told him the same thing in his own way: “You don’t know what I’d give to play blackjack with you.”
To Kenny, Michael was in that same spot. On CNN he put it this way: “You don’t meet guys who have that kind of success that really are able to communicate at a different level. And that’s a success I would not wish on anybody.”
Where Kenny’s words come from
The Dan Rather conversation aired on AXS TV. The only clip of Kenny telling this story that we could find online is a fan upload, not the network’s own, so there’s no video here. His words above come from CNN’s transcript of his 2009 call with Larry King and from Whiskey Riff’s 2025 write-up of the Rather interview.
The camera stayed in Kenny’s life long after that day. Artnet notes he studied with the portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh and with John Sexton.
Lucille Ball was promised 15 minutes. So was Elizabeth Taylor. Michael got a whole working day in Kenny’s studio and what Kenny called the first pictures of him in the hat.