𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐍𝐄

―𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒍𝒖𝒅𝒆¹

interlude¹ | MORE SPELL ON YOU

❝'Cause I'm dead in love with you... And you've got to love me too.❞

●

WALLY HEIDER STUDIOS,
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA.
JANUARY 1978.

There was a game Michael Jackson and his brother, Marlon Jackson, loved to play as children: Who would be the lucky fellow to nab Miss Ross?

The game was simple. Who could make her laugh the hardest? Whose dancing could win her approval the quickest? Who could ask the better question, make the most astute observation? And when one year, Diana told them she was having a baby, their next task had turned into a battle of wits neither of them won: Who could paint the walls of the nursery faster? In the end, it was Bob, her then-husband, who finished the rest, and Marlon and Michael, exhausted and splattered in pink paint, had looked on in disappointment, wondering if their little sport had ever mattered much at all.

Time ushered on. Marlon's attention shifted to Carol and Michael's pivoted to the freckled-face girl from Paper Moon. Tatum O'Neal had been a welcome—and wild—introduction to reality. That silly game that had once sat center stage in his childhood slowly receded into the backdrop, dwindling to nothing. It shrank into the confines of the past until one day, it blindsided him, returning as something stronger, hardier.

During that wild ride through the shaky berth of adolescence, he realized it had never left him. It had simply been lying dormant, a hibernating monster resting deep inside of him. A monster that intensified with every phone call, impromptu "dinner date", and excursion out on the town. And when he reached the tail-end of those years, eighteen and nineteen, still young, but in his mind and spirit, older than anyone could ever understand, he found himself anxiously shifting his sails.

1977 was a turbulent time fraught with change and uncertainty, but with a gusto unlike any he ever mustered before, he undertook the task of trying to know her. Deeply, intimately know her.

Before long, he learned an important lesson.

Diane Ross, the woman Michael Jackson loved, was a tough nut to crack.

She was someone he had known for years and yet somehow, she was still a mystery. A woman who had put work into him, giving him kindness, love, and knowledge, and yet floated through every phase and facet of his life like an enigma. Though he was vaguely familiar with the whispers regarding her character, of who people claimed she "really was", they always seemed unintelligible. She was a puzzle, difficult to complete; an object in deep, murky water, visible but tough to discern.

Like anyone in his position, he assumed he had everything, including the opposite sex, figured out. Years of navigating scenes far too advanced for someone of his age had equipped him with knowledge most people would never have the fortune of experiencing. That was another issue: arrogance—with just the right amount of sweetness, he thought, she would peel open and become as decipherable as the starry-eyed girls who revealed who they were with little to no effort on his part.

But here he was, a decade into this silly thing, and he still couldn't make heads or tails of her. Not even when he tried. Not even when he slyly asked for advice ("What do women like?") or looked into her eyes after a long day, wondering if she felt what he felt. He would see nothing, nothing but the regular-shmegular, good-natured doting she had shown him all of those years. Nothing but the soft, maddening reminder that what she saw was yards from what he felt.

He had no idea what he was thinking. When he alluded to the possibility of his childhood feelings stalking him into adulthood, Bill teased him.

"You're too old to be hosting a schoolboy crush," he said.