When Katharine Hepburn gave Michael Jackson acting lessons: “He wanted to be a movie star”
By all accounts, the set of Mark Rydell’s Academy Award-winning 1981 drama, On Golden Pond, was a strange place, and that was before Michael Jackson turned up to make things even more bizarre.
It was always destined to be an awards season contender based entirely on the heavyweight central trio of Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Jane Fonda, with the father and daughter duo sharing the screen for the one and only time, and the film delivered in spades.
The second-generation actor was the driving force behind the project, purchasing the rights to Ernest Thompson’s eponymous novel specifically for his father to play the role of Norman Thayer, but Fonda got more than she bargained for when the legendary Hepburn began throwing her weight around.
There was a tinge of jealousy to the way the ‘Golden Age’ icon treated the young upstart, and sometimes it teetered into the absurd, like when Fonda recalled Hepburn hiding in the bushes to spy on her when she was performing cartwheels, and she rarely missed an opportunity to have a dig at someone she perceived as the pretender to her throne.
Ironically, for Hepburn at least, Fonda was the only one of the three who didn’t win an Oscar for their performance. However, she was responsible for bringing Jackson to set, which initially bemused her veteran co-star, especially when the two of them started skinny-dipping in a nearby lake.
In a typically elusive fashion, Jackson contacted Fonda and asked her to check with Hepburn if it was OK for him to hang around the On Golden Pond shoot for ten days. Clearly oblivious to the fact that he was one of the most famous people on the planet, the actor remembered that “she was not happy.”
Eventually, though, Hepburn developed a fascination with Jackson and even took the ‘King of Pop’ under her wing. The child singer-turned-solo sensation had recently made his performative debut in Sidney Lumet’s musical The Wiz, which saw him bitten by the acting bug. If there’s anyone an aspiring thespian should learn from, one of the all-time greats is a decent place to start.
“He wanted to be a movie star,” Fonda explained to Hollywood Masters. “He had just finished doing The Wiz. And he had a tape recorder with him, and every day I would bring him to the set, and in between scenes, she would sit down in a chair and pull over a chair for him and tell him stories.”
Enraptured by the company, Jackson soaked up every piece of knowledge Hepburn gave him, even if it didn’t parlay into a full-time tilt at silver screen stardom. “Every story embedded a lesson,” Fonda continued. “For example, she talked about Laurette Taylor, probably one of the great American actors.”
Hepburn described her performance in a stage production of The Glass Menagerie as “this transcendent piece of acting,” but when she saw Taylor reprising the role decades later, “The magic was gone,” which led to her most pivotal piece of wisdom: “She said to Michael, ‘She wasn’t hungry anymore’. What a great thing to say to a young, rising star like Michael: You gotta stay hungry. Don’t ever phone it in. Don’t ever take it for granted.”
He may not have followed through on his acting dreams, but as his star continued to rise throughout the ’80s, perhaps he took Hepburn’s words to heart in a different way.
