The greatest interview ever of Michael Jackson?
This coming Friday night, Sept. 25, NBC will air a one-hour, prime-time “Dateline” special hosted by Meredith Vieira, featuring a book I am publishing on the 30 hours of conversations I conducted with Michael Jackson. The book, “The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals His Soul in Private Conversation,” contains the most insightful, raw, painful and authentic conversations for public distribution that Michael ever had. It was Michael’s desperate wish that our conversations be produced and the book be published so that his heart might be known to a public he understood was greatly suspicious of him. He wanted to share a deeper side of himself that our friendship had begun to uncover. The depth and searing honesty of the conversations contained in the book are sure to change the public’s perception of Michael forever.
The choice to air the TV special launching the book on a Friday night, although it unavoidably demands that the normally live program will have to be prerecorded in deference to the laws of the Jewish Sabbath, goes hand-in-hand with a recurring theme in the book. Michael and I always dreamed of introducing a national family dinner night, an evening when parents would prioritize their children without distraction. Friday night was the natural choice since Michael, a non-Jew raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, loved the Jewish Sabbath meals he ate at our home with his children. A superstar whose life was frenzied and harried, he welcomed the utter serenity of an evening where cell phones and TVs were off and the only sound was that of intimate conversation and gentle laughter.
