The door opened, and it wasn’t Michael Jackson who came through it first.
It was two small children. They bolted into the room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the TV Guide writers waiting there got their first look at 4-year-old Prince and 3-year-old Paris.
That was 25 years ago this week. The interview ran in TV Guide’s issue dated November 10 to 16, 2001, under the byline of writers Mary Murphy and Jennifer Graham. Michael sat down to talk while his two little ones played on the floor by his feet. Their baby brother Bigi, first called Blanket, wasn’t born yet.
It wasn’t a quiet room.
Paris skipped around the coffee table. Prince figured out that a bottle of Snapple lemonade made a pretty good drum if you banged it on the table hard enough. And the most famous entertainer on the planet kept stopping mid-answer to be a dad, because the reporters’ tape recorders needed to hear him.
“Paris, you can’t make noise,” he told her gently.
Then he turned to his son. “See the noise you’re making? You’ve got to be nice and quiet.”
Anyone who has tried to take a phone call with two toddlers in the room knows how well that usually works. If you want to see what these two looked like at that age next to their dad, this real footage from the same year puts you right there with them.
Michael out with Prince and Paris in Los Angeles in August 2001
Then the writers asked the question every parent and grandparent hears sooner or later. Which one is most like you?
A lot of famous parents would have smiled and changed the subject. Michael didn’t. He gave each child an answer of their own, and he didn’t make either one sound like a little angel.
“Both, but in different ways,” he told TV Guide. “Prince likes to tease, to the point where you want to pull his hair. I always used to tease my sisters all the time.”
Michael grew up with three sisters. Rebbie was the oldest of the nine Jackson children, and then came La Toya and Janet. So the little boy drumming on the table with his lemonade took after his dad, the big brother who loved getting a rise out of his sisters.
Then the writers asked, “And Paris?”
Michael’s answer was short.
“She’s the tough one.”
That’s a funny thing to hear about a 3-year-old who was skipping around a coffee table a few minutes earlier. But any family with a strong-willed little girl will recognize it right away. Michael wasn’t describing a pair of perfect children for a magazine. He was describing his kids.
These short home-video clips of Michael with Prince and Paris, filmed around those same years, show the everyday family life behind that answer.
Home videos of Michael with Prince and Paris
It’s easy to forget that in the fall of 2001, the King of Pop was also a dad of two doing an interview with a lemonade drummer at his feet. He didn’t give a polished answer. He gave the kind you’d give at the kitchen table, with the kids listening in.
And 25 years later, plenty of grandparents still get asked the same question about their own grandkids.