Most people never think about what it actually costs to be that famous. Michael Jackson didn’t have the luxury of not thinking about it. By the early 1980s, stepping outside his front door without a plan was no longer an option.
His brother Marlon described what it looked like from the outside. HE ONCE WALKED INTO A RECORD STORE AND SPOTTED A MAN WITH A DIRTY SHIRT, TORN CLOTHES, AN AFRO, AND BUCKED TEETH, buying a stack of expensive records. He leaned in and whispered, and the man was Michael.
Marlon said it was mind-boggling, that the moment Michael stepped outside without a disguise, within seconds, everything around him stopped.
Being Himself In The Public Was Not An Option
Michael talked about it himself in a 2002 interview. He described living in a fishbowl, knowing the disguises never really worked forever, but doing it anyway. Fat suits, buck teeth, glasses, afros, prosthetics, full makeup jobs, he ran through all of it.
He said the reason was simple. He wanted to sit in an audience and feel what a normal person feels watching a show. He wanted to go to a record store and just browse.
He Had To Be Unrecognizeable Just To Go Outside
His first documented outing in disguise was in 1982, when he attended a Kool and the Gang concert with then-girlfriend Tatum O’Neal. He had called in Rick Baker, an Oscar-winning special effects artist, TO AGE HIS FACE AND COMPLETELY TRANSFORM HIS APPEARANCE. Nobody recognized him that night.
The disguises got less convincing as he got older, and people started recognizing them, too. The gap between who he was and what a normal life required had become too wide to close, no matter what he wore.