For more than two months, hardly anyone knew Michael Jackson had gotten married. Then, in early August 1994, the news finally broke. His bride was Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley, and the two of them had quietly become husband and wife.
Most newlyweds would have slipped off somewhere private. A beach, maybe. A quiet island where no one could find them.
Michael and Lisa Marie flew to Budapest instead.
They landed in Hungary on August 5, 1994, just days after the marriage was announced. It was their first time out in public as a married couple, and the cameras were everywhere. The Associated Press filmed the most famous couple in the world stepping off into a waiting crowd, in a city that had never seen anything like it.
Watch the two of them arrive, with photographers pressing in from every side.
Michael and Lisa Marie touch down in Hungary, August 1994
But they hadn’t come for sightseeing.
The real reason was a children’s hospital. At Bethesda Children’s Hospital, Michael met a little boy named Béla Farkas. Béla was about four years old and very sick. He needed a new liver, and his family was running out of time to find one.
Michael didn’t just stop in for a photo and leave. His charity, the Heal the World Foundation, stepped in to pay for the whole operation. Doctors found a hospital in Brussels that could do the surgery, and a 1996 newspaper report put Michael’s gift at around $120,000.
The next day the couple went back out and handed presents to children all over the city.
Here they are giving out gifts during that same visit.
The newlyweds hand out presents to children in Budapest
And the surgery worked.
In July 1996, Michael came back to Budapest for a concert, and he went to see Béla again. The boy was six by then, healthy and smiling, and Michael gave the whole family a VIP box at the show.
Béla grew up. He goes by Tamás these days, and he’s a father himself now. In 2019, as a grown man, he told a French reporter that he still has the teddy bear Michael handed him back in 1994. He also said one thing that stayed with a lot of people: “I often wonder what made him choose me among dozens of children.”
He doesn’t take any of it lightly. “Without Jackson and Professor Otte, I would certainly not be here anymore,” he told the reporter.
AP’s cameras captured part of this story as it was happening in 1994. Its own title uses a word we’d never use, so just know this is the report on the little boy whose operation Michael paid for.
AP’s 1994 report on the little boy Michael helped in Budapest
So the first trip Michael and Lisa Marie took as husband and wife wasn’t really about them at all. It was about a sick little boy who got a second chance because they showed up, and about a teddy bear one grown man still keeps all these years later.