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"On the Rox" Club Visit / Playboy Mansion Dinner Party
"On the Rox" Club Visit:
Michael Jackson, Moonwalk autobiography
My first real date was with Tatum O’Neal. We met at a club on Sunset Strip called On the Rox. We exchanged phone numbers and called each other often. I talked to her for hours: from the road, from the studio, from home… She had held my hand for the first time that night at On the Rox. When we met, I was sitting at this table and all of a sudden I felt this soft hand reach over and grab mine. It was Tatum. This probably wouldn’t mean a lot to other people, but it was serious stuff to me. She touched me . That’s how I felt about it. In the past, girls had always touched me on tour; grabbing at me and screaming, behind a wall of security guards. But this was different, this was one-on-one, and that’s always the best.
Rabbi Schmuley interview, The Michael Jackson Tapes book
When I held Tatum’s hand it was just magic, better than anything, kissing her, anything. Her, Ryan O’Neal and myself went to this club and were watching a band and underneath a table she was holding my hand I was melting. It was magical. There was fireworks going on. It was all I needed. But that means nothing to kids today. She grew up too fast. She wasn’t into innocence, and I love that [innocence].
Robert Hilburn, author, “Corn Flakes with John Lennon” book
…when I asked [Michael] about supposed encounters with Tatum O’Neal, his eyes got big as he told me about the time at the Roxy that she had actually put her hand on his knee under the table.
Tatum O’Neal, “A Paper Life” autobiography
I met him at the On the Rox, the club Lou Adler & Jack Nicholson opened upstairs from the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. Michael was around 17 at the time, about 5 years older than me, & he seemed very sheltered & fearful & lonely–not at all what you’d expect a world-renowned performer to be. As I recall, he didn’t even know how to drive a car.
He gave me his number, and we started talking everyday–long drawn-out conversations that sometimes got so boring I would hand over the receiver to my friend Esme Gray. Michael would just keep on, thinking he was talking to me. His usual subject was sex. At 12 I didn’t have much to say about sex–all I knew was that it went on, pretty steadily, in my father’s room next to mine. But Michael was intensely curious about anything, everything sexual, though in an incredibly sweet & innocent way.
He was a huge star, but it seemed he barely even dated & knew little about life. He once came to my house and asked to come upstairs because he’d never been in a girl’s bedroom before. He sat on the bed, and we kissed very briefly, but it was terribly awkward. For all my passionate crushes on people like Dustin Hoffman, I was just 12 and not at all ready for a real-life encounter. So I said, ’I can’t.’ Michael, who was sweating profusely, seemed as intimidated as I was. He jumped up nervously and said,’Uh, gotta go.’
That’s the closest I ever got to Michael…
I never worked with Michael, but he and I had a really wonderful friendship when I was 12 and he was 17. He used to dance with me, we’d talk on the phone all the time, and he’d say how funny it was that I was 12 and I could drive and he was older and couldn’t. Michael used to come to my house when I was living with my dad, and I remember him being so shy. Once he came into my bedroom, and he wouldn’t even sit on my bed. But another time when he was over, he played the drums, my brother played guitar, and someone else played another instrument, and we had a jam session. I had the tape of it, but I lost it somewhere.
Susan Blond, Ron Galella’s book (currently locating title)
I introduced Michael to Tatum O’Neal at On the Rox in Hollywood. Her father Ryan flirted with me a little, so Tatum sat on Michael’s lap (she was still a kid, although she had won an Academy Award).
Playboy Mansion Dinner Party:
Randy Taborelli, The Magic and the Madness
The next day [after the “On the Rox” meeting], Tatum invited Michael to a dinner party at Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's rambling Holmby Hills estate. There they watched Roots, the highly rated Alex Haley television mini-series, on videotape. When Tatum became bored, she asked Michael to get into the hot tub with her. ‘But I don't have a bathing suit,’ he said.
‘Who needs bathing suits?’ Tatum responded.
When Michael began to blush, Tatum asked one of Hefner's assistants for two swimsuits, then handed one to Michael.
Tatum's hair was soft, blond and flowed just below her shoulders. Her skin was baby pink and her figure quite ample for a girl who wouldn't turn fourteen until close to the end of the year. She was almost plump. ‘She's like a sacred doll,’ Michael observed of her to a friend. He said that while soaking in the water and watching for shooting stars, the two shared secrets with one another.
Years later, rumour would have it that they were nude together in the hot tub. ‘Oh, we weren't naked,’ Michael firmly pointed out to me in an interview. ‘We had on bathing suits. Why do people have to always find something dirty in everything?’
“Michael Jackson Story”, 1977
The singer had been seen many times in the company of adolescent actress Tatum O’Neal. After the critical acclaim she received acting with her father Ryan in Paper Moon she was in the same position as Michael. Everywhere she went Tatum was the centre of attraction. Michael could empathize with the pressures of child stardom and found in her a kindred spirit.
In fact reports reached the press that the relationship had turned torrid at Hugh Hefner’s Los Angeles mansion and that they had taken a nude sauna bath together. “Well, I guess I am dating her in a way,” he explained. “I’ve taken her out a couple of times — or she’s taken me out — whatever. ‘I met her sometime back, when Paul McCartney gave a party on the Queen Mary boat. She was there and we talked a bit. Two years went by before I saw her again, which was at a club on Sunset Blvd called the Roxy. We talked and talked and talked. The next day she invited me to join her at Hugh Hefner’s house to watch Roots on videotape. She got sort of bored, so we went outside and got into the jacuzzi. We weren’t naked as people have said. We both had on bathing suits, just enjoying ourselves. And that’s it.”
Jet Magazine, September 22, 1977
About the rumor which had him swimming naked in with actress Tatum O'Neal, Michael says, "We weren't naked. We both had on bathing suits, just enjoying ourselves. And that's it."