In the late 1970s, On the Rox was a private club upstairs from the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. One night Michael Jackson was sitting at a table there. He’d been famous since he was a boy singing lead for the Jackson 5, but he was shy around girls and hardly dated at all.
The girl who came into his life that night was already a Hollywood name of her own. At 10, Tatum O’Neal won the Oscar for best supporting actress for “Paper Moon,” playing opposite her father, Ryan O’Neal. She’s still the youngest person ever to win a competitive Academy Award. She was born on Nov. 5, 1963, which means she turns 63 this week.
Years later, Tatum told Andy Cohen on SiriusXM that she met Michael at On the Rox, a private club in Hollywood. She remembered how he gave her his number. “He gave me his phone number, Havenhurst, on On the Rox matchbooks, which I still have,” she said. Havenhurst was the Jackson family home in Encino.
How long did it last? “It was on and off for a few years,” Tatum said. Much of it happened on the phone, because Michael was always on the road.
Tatum O’Neal remembers meeting Michael at On the Rox
This is the official upload from SiriusXM’s Radio Andy. From the start of the clip to about 1:02, Andy Cohen asks how long she dated Michael, and Tatum talks about the phone calls, the club and the matchbooks she kept.
Michael told the story his own way in “Moonwalk,” the memoir he published in 1988. “My first real date was with Tatum O’Neal,” he wrote. “We met at a club on Sunset Strip called On the Rox. We exchanged phone numbers and called each other often.”
He wasn’t exaggerating about the calls. “I talked to her for hours: from the road, from the studio, from home,” he wrote.
The moment he wrote about most came before any of that, the night they met. Michael was at his table when someone reached across it.
“When we met, I was sitting at this table and all of a sudden I felt this soft hand reach over and grab mine,” he wrote. “It was Tatum.”
It was a small thing, and he knew it. “This probably wouldn’t mean a lot to other people, but it was serious stuff to me,” Michael wrote. “She touched me. That’s how I felt about it.”
He explained why. Until then, the only girls who reached for him were fans. “In the past, girls had always touched me on tour; grabbing at me and screaming, behind a wall of security guards,” he wrote. “But this was different, this was one-on-one, and that’s always the best.”
Michael didn’t hide what came next either. “I fell in love with her (and she with me) and we were very close for a long time,” he wrote in “Moonwalk.” In time it turned into a friendship.
Looking back in the book, Michael put a name on it. “We still talk now and then, and I guess you’d have to say she was my first love,” he wrote, before adding two words: “after Diana.” That was Diana Ross, the star who had looked after him since his Motown days.
Tatum kept her own souvenir from the club. Those On the Rox matchbooks, with Michael’s number at Havenhurst on them, are still with her.