On March 16, 2002, guests filled Marble Collegiate Church in New York to watch Liza Minnelli marry David Gest. Hello! magazine put the crowd at about 500. Michael Jackson was a best man. Elizabeth Taylor was a maid of honor. And when it was time to start, the two of them were tucked away in the priest’s room while the whole church sat and waited.
Robert Wagner was one of the people waiting. Most TV viewers know him as Jonathan Hart, the charming millionaire of “Hart to Hart,” and he had more reason than most to be in a pew that day. “I hosted their engagement party,” he told Larry King on “Larry King Now” in 2014. Then he added, “I have no idea why I got roped into that.”
King raised the subject because Wagner opens his book “You Must Remember This” with the story. The host didn’t dress it up. “That had to be the strangest wedding of all time,” he said.
Out in the church, somebody decided Wagner was the man to fix the delay. “They said go and get her out of there, we got to get the wedding started,” he remembered. His answer was about what you’d expect from a guest who thought his duties had ended with the engagement party: “And I said why the hell me?” As he pointed out, “there’s a lot of people here.”
He went anyway. “So I go back there,” he said. Elizabeth was in the priest’s room, just as he’d been told. So was Michael, and he wasn’t standing.
“Michael is at her feet gazing up at her,” Wagner said. “You know, he loved her. He was besotted by her.”
Watch Robert Wagner tell Larry King what he saw in the priest’s room
This short clip comes from Larry King’s official channel. Wagner begins the story at about 0:08, describes walking in on Michael at about 0:49 and gets to Michael’s answer at about 0:57.
So what was holding up the day Hello! called New York’s wedding of the year?
A pair of shoes. “She came, she was the maid of honor, and when she arrived she had forgotten her shoes, so they had to go back to the hotel and get the shoes,” Wagner explained. “So everybody was waiting.”
That’s why Elizabeth hadn’t come out. In his words, “she was waiting in the priest’s room for the shoes and Michael Jackson was at her feet.”
Getting Michael to move was another matter. “I said, ‘Michael, we got to go,'” Wagner recalled.
According to Wagner, Michael had one thing to say, and he said it twice: “I love Elizabeth. I love Elizabeth.”
Wagner tried a little diplomacy. “I know, Michael, we all love Elizabeth,” he told him, “but let’s put her shoes on and get her going.”
The two of them went back a long way. Michael and Elizabeth had been close since the 1980s, and when she got married at his Neverland ranch in 1991, he was the one who walked her down the aisle. Eleven years later, at a friend’s wedding, he still didn’t want to leave her side.
The ceremony went ahead that evening. CBS News reported the next day that Michael carried the bride’s train for part of the walk, until another maid of honor took over. Wagner, who had only come as a guest, went home with the story he’d one day use to open a book.