The night started at a dance show. Patrick Swayze was performing at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and Melissa Gilbert, known to millions as Laura “Half-Pint” Ingalls on “Little House on the Prairie,” went along with her agent, Michael Black. Her boyfriend had to miss it. “Rob couldn’t go cuz he was shooting St. Elmo’s Fire,” she said.
Rob was Rob Lowe, and Black was his agent too. Gilbert told the story to her old “Little House” co-star Patrick Labyorteaux on his podcast, after he asked her one question: “What is the most Hollywood moment in your life?”
Her answer began after the curtain came down. She and Black went on to Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant, “where we were met by Rob and Andrew McCarthy,” she said. That made four at the table: the agent, Gilbert, Lowe and McCarthy, who was in “St. Elmo’s Fire” with him.
It didn’t stay four for long. “There’s like a commotion at the door,” Gilbert said, “and Liza Minnelli came in and beelined and sat down at our table.”
Then the door got noisy a second time. “Then there was another commotion at the door and Michael Jackson came in and he came and sat at our table,” she said.
Gilbert had grown up in front of TV cameras, but this was too much for her. She kept turning to her boyfriend. “I keep looking at Rob going, ‘What’s going on? Please, I have to go. I want to go home. I’m scared of all of this,'” she said. Lowe’s answer was calm: “No, just sit here. We’re going to be okay.”
So she sat. The meal went on, and the chef kept coming over himself. “Wolfgang’s bringing us pizzas that he’s made and he’s sitting down and people are hovering around,” Gilbert said. In the middle of all that noise, the most famous singer in the world sat quietly in his chair. “Michael Jackson is not saying a word,” she said.
She’d told it the same way in her 2009 memoir, “Prairie Tale.” There she wrote that Michael came straight to their table and sat down just as dinner was served, and that after greeting Minnelli, “he didn’t say a word. Nothing.”
Melissa Gilbert tells the Spago story on Patrick Labyorteaux’s podcast
This clip is from Labyorteaux’s own channel, The Patrick LabyorSheaux. Gilbert starts the story right at the top, Michael walks into the restaurant at about 1:14, and his part of the night runs to about 1:51.
The quiet lasted until the meal was finished and the group started working out where to go next. That’s when Michael finally spoke, at about 1:41 in the clip.
“We’re trying to figure out where to go,” Gilbert said. “And Michael Jackson, only thing he says the whole night: ‘You can come to my house. I got a llama.'”
The memoir has the same line, word for word. A book and a podcast, and the sentence didn’t change between them.
Michael wasn’t joking about the animal, either. In the 1980s he kept a llama named Louie at the Jackson family home in Encino, California, and he posed for photos with it.
The table didn’t take him up on it. Gilbert leaned over to Lowe one more time and said, “I really have to go home now.” Minnelli had another idea. “No, we’re going to Sammy’s,” she said, in Gilbert’s telling.
“Michael Jackson leaves,” Gilbert said. “We go to Sammy Davis Jr.’s house.”
That was the end of his evening with them. Labyorteaux had asked for the most Hollywood moment of her life, and Michael’s whole part in it came to one dinner and ten words.