Michael Jackson is one of the most famous human beings that has ever lived. When you think about him — you don’t just compare his impact with the pop stars that came after him like Mariah Carey and Drake. To understand him, you need to look back to the Julius Caesars and Marie Antoinettes. But if you asked some of his closest peers — like Lionel Richie — it came at a great personal cost.
The entertainment industry has always been cutthroat. And for people like Jackson, in particular, most of his close peers were also seen as competition. Even friends like Paul McCartney, who started out as a confidant, ended up rivals after Jackson bought rights to The Beatles’ music. But with Richie, for some reason their relationship never soured, and together they even crafted one of the most beloved humanitarian songs in We Are The World.
However, if you let Richie tell it, he’ll say their level of stardom was nowhere near the same. Richie, 76, has finally released a memoir in his golden years and shed light on his relationship with Michael Jackson, particularly how he was never the cleanest person. In fact, the late iconic producer Quincy Jones even gave him the nickname “smelly,” which caught on within their friend group.
The way Lionel Richie explains it is that all musicians were eccentric in their own ways. Jackson just happened to be poor hygiene. At that point in his career, Jackson toured heavily, and when he wasn’t on the road, he’d wear “loose” clothes that allowed him to practice his seemingly impossible dance feats.
Richie reveals in his book that he got to hang out with a much more casual, outgoing version of Jackson. He wrote, “(When Michael) came to visit me, he was wearing whatever — jeans and a t-shirt. And the jeans were either falling off him or too short to even be jeans and, well, smelly.”
Richie shared that the reason Jackson was always musty was apparently because he couldn’t get his clothes laundered. More often than not, when they were sent out to be washed, they never came back. Everyone wanted a souvenir from the King of Pop. So Jackson would just wear the same clothes until they were, as Richie puts it: “unwearable.”
But the question remains: certainly Jackson could have at least taken a shower. Richie owed that to his late friend never having enough time for “errands.” Still, even if that were the case, surely Jackson could have hired a maid he trusted to return his clothes washed. The man could get a giraffe for his home — a reliable maid couldn’t have been that hard to find.
However, according to Yahoo!, Jackson got more than just reliability from his maids. One former maid revealed that the Grammy winner would “poop throughout the house and think nothing of it.” That’s certainly something a busy schedule and overzealous fans can’t explain away.
If you have the appetite for more stories about the eccentric routines of Hollywood stars circa 1980, Lionel Richie’s memoir Truly is out now at your local bookstore.
