Teddy Riley had worked with some of the biggest names in music. Meeting two toddlers made him nervous.
It happened in Virginia, while Michael Jackson was making “Invincible.” That album came out in 2001, and it turned out to be his last record of new songs. Riley was one of the producers in the room, and by then he had a big name of his own. He founded the groups Guy and Blackstreet, and he pioneered New Jack Swing, the mix of hip-hop and R&B that made his sound famous. He’d also co-produced half of Michael’s 1991 album “Dangerous.”
So Riley wasn’t new to working with Michael. This was different, though. Michael wanted him to meet his children.
Prince and Paris were very small back then. Prince was born in 1997 and Paris came along a year later, so they were still little ones while their dad worked on the album.
Riley talked about that day with MTV News in July 2009, and he didn’t pretend he’d been cool about it. “I felt so nervous meeting his children,” he said.
Michael kept it simple. “He brought them in and he said, ‘I want you to meet Paris and I want you to meet Prince.'”
Then came the part Riley never forgot.
The music world knows him as Teddy. That’s the name on the records and the name people use when they talk about him. But his full name is Edward Theodore Riley, and nobody went by that middle name.
Except Michael.
“And then he was like, ‘This is Theodore’. He didn’t say Teddy,” Riley remembered.
It was a small thing, but it told the kids something. Here was a grown man, and their father gave him his proper grown-up name, the way parents teach little ones to be polite to adults. Prince and Paris picked it right up. “They were like, ‘Hi, Theodore!’ And it was just the greatest feeling,” Riley said.
That polite little moment fit with what Riley saw from Michael as a dad all through those sessions. Books were a big part of the day. “He read them a book every day,” Riley said. “When we were in Virginia during the Invincible [sessions], there was not one day missed reading the children something.”
This fan-shared clip shows Michael doing just that, sitting down with a book for Prince and Paris.
Michael reading a story to Prince and Paris
Riley noticed that Michael kept discipline gentle too. When the kids needed correcting, out came another book. “The best scolding for children was, ‘Let’s read a book,'” he said.
And when something stronger was called for, Michael had his own idea of a time-out. “He sent them to the bunks with no TV,” Riley said.
To Riley, that sounded pretty mild. “For me, that’s a good time-out.”
Prince and Paris didn’t see it quite the same way. “But the kids, they knew what it was.”