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"Smile" Single Cover Photoshoot

Date range assessed by the fact that “In December, Sony planned to release a double A-side single comprising ‘Smile’ and ‘Is It Scary’” (Mike Smallcombe, “Making Michael”) and Steven said it occurred “late in 1994”.

Steven Whitsitt, photographer, personal website

In late in 1994, I had been flying from LA to NY regularly to do photo shoots with Michael at Sony Music studios. Sometimes I would fly out on Thursday and stay until Monday or Tuesday, with the shoot day being on Saturday or Sunday. Once in awhile I would stay over the whole week and shoot two weekends in a row.

One late afternoon I was in my hotel and the phone rang, “Please hold for Michael”  ……… His voice came on the line, “ Steve can you come over to the apartment, I want to talk to you?” “Sure Mike, I’ll be there in a half hour.”  I walked the few blocks to Trump Tower where Michael was staying during the recording of the HIStory project. When I got to Michael’s floor, his chef let me in and promptly said goodbye leaving Michael & I alone.

After a few minutes of chatting Michael got down to business:

“Steve, do you know the song Smile?”  

“I think so Michael, but I’m not sure…..”

“Here I’ll just sing it for you….”

To put my reaction in context, one has to realize that I was born and raised in a small city  just north of Detroit, MI. I had never expected to go very far or do very much in my life, Though I had worked as an assistant for Michael’s personal photographer for 3 years, my rise to the position that I was now in was head-spinning fast. I’d had conversations with Michael, and was reasonably comfortable with the day to day working relationship, but here I was a kid from Port Huron, MI. and this man was singing a song for an audience of one. Me.

It wasn’t just the fact that he was singing for me, it was the absolute stunning clarity of his a cappella voice. The hair on my arms stood, I was moved almost to tears. The whole thing lasted only a couple of minutes, when he had finished, Michael asked if I knew anything about the history of the song. I took a couple of seconds to catch my breath, and mumbled some sort of response.

For the next few hours Michael educated me on Charlie Chaplin, and specifically his film “The Kid” and about Jackie Coogan the child actor who played opposite Chaplin in the film, and how Jackie’s experiences led to all of the laws that now exist protecting child performers. Michael was a wealth of information. We discussed how we wanted to approach shooting a single cover for the song, and settled on a couple of concepts.

The next several weeks were a blur of interviewing set builders, casting, and covering all of the details necessary to pull the shoot together. Michael didn’t need to tell me that he expected perfection out of this shoot. He inspired it in me in when he sang the song. We were both pleased with the results.

“Los Angeles Times” (December 9, 2009) (archived)

The black-and-white photos of Michael Jackson are remarkable not only as previously unreleased images of one the last half-century’s most photographed men. They also reveal much about the pop superstar’s abiding impulses: his impish sense of humor, his fealty to yesteryear’s master showmen and his concern about his own place in the pop culture firmament.

Sporting a threadbare black suit, pancake makeup and a miniature brush mustache, Jackson is a doppelgänger for Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character from 1921’s “The Kid.” The photos, taken in 1994 by Steve Whitsitt, were originally intended as a companion piece to the Chaplin-inspired video the director-photographer was shooting for “Smile” -- the cover of the silent comedian’s famous song that appears on Jackson’s “HIStory” album. But when the Chaplin estate issued a cease-and-desist order to stifle “Smile’s” release as a video and single, Whitsitt abandoned the photos to his archives.

Until earlier this year, that is, when the photographer received a surprise phone call from photo editor Deborah Wald, who was working on a new Jackson omnibus. “I asked him if he had something special, something of Michael that hadn’t previously seen the light of day,” Wald said. “And he said, ‘I think I have something.’ ”

Whitsitt’s seven photos, as well as some 300 other images of and for the King of Pop that have never before been seen publicly, provide the backbone for “The Official Michael Jackson Opus”: a lushly produced coffee-table book that came out Monday.