Lionel Richie Orginally Thought Jacko Was A Midget



(image via mjsite)

However monstrous one feels about Michael Jackson's "playtime" with kids, he is an incredible entertainer. Really astonishing. His moonwalk defies the laws of physics. His goddam freakishness notwithstanding, the man has moves. And his moves are even awe-inspiring to seasoned entertainers like Lionel Richie, who thought Michael Jackson, at 12, was some sort of a gimmick and not an actual child. From Vanity Fair (?), which does a history of Motown:

"Smokey Robinson says he’s known Michael since he was 10 or 11. 'He is the best who ever did it. The singing and the dancing and the records—the whole package. But somewhere ... he just got lost. It’s easy to do,” says Robinson.

De Passe, who suggested to Gordy that he sign the Jackson 5 after she watched them perform in 1968 in Bobby Taylor’s living room, says that Gordy at first said no because he didn’t want to work with children. 'He said, Kids? I don’t want any kids. You know how much trouble it is with Stevie Wonder and the teachers, and when you’re a minor you have to have a special chaperone ... it is a problem. I had to really muster up all my courage and go back to him,' says de Passe. 'Finally he agreed to see them.'

"At first Richie didn’t believe that Jackson was actually a child. 'This little kid did everything in the first song. I kept waiting for Suzanne [de Passe] to tell me what the real secret was, that Michael was a midget, because it couldn’t be anything else,” Richie says. 'Then I realized, that’s a real 12-year-old kid. I would watch him play with water balloons backstage, anything that kids do, and then he’d walk onstage and turn into this full-grown entertaining monster.'"

More on Lisa Robinson's wonderful history of Motown here.