There’s this really eye-catching picture of Princess Diana and Michael Jackson that’s always lingered in my mind. At first look, it appears to be just a regular moment between two superstars, but when you look closer, there’s a whole lot more to their story. Were you aware that there was more to their connection than what was obvious?
Both Princess Diana and Michael Jackson are so well-known that they don’t need any extra introduction – their fame and status are legendary. It wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility that these two huge personalities would cross paths, but hardly anyone could have predicted that their meeting would lead to something deeper than just a friendly chat…
ONLY MET IN PERSON ONCE
First off, Diana, who was lovingly called “The People’s Princess,” was a huge music lover. Apparently, her favorite band was Duran Duran, and she adored their music, especially back in the 1980s.
However, Diana also had Michael Jackson’s albums in her record collection, which shows she really liked his music too. For example, it’s said she played the albums Thriller and Bad over and over.
MJ’s music was actually the reason Diana got to meet him on July 16, 1988.
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That day, she and her husband at the time, Prince Charles, went to Michael Jackson’s Bad tour concert at Wembley Stadium. This was both their first and last meeting.
“She told me she was honored to meet me,” Jackson said in a 1997 interview with Barbara Walters.
Michael remembered being really nervous before shaking hands with Diana – you can almost feel that uneasiness in the pictures from that day. There was a reason their first meeting seemed a bit clumsy and cautious.
This was mainly because the superstar had chosen to take out the song “Dirty Diana” from the concert setlist, fearing it might bother her. The song, which is about a rock groupie, seemed like it wouldn’t be right to perform with a female royal in the audience, or so he thought.
“I took it out of the show in honor of Her Royal Highness,” Jackson told Barbara Walters in 1997.
DIANA’S REACTION TO MEETING MICHAEL JACKSON
But Diana wasn’t too happy about that.
Diana asked Michael if he was going to perform “Dirty Diana” during the meet-and-greet before the show. He said he had removed it from the setlist because of her. But she urged him to go ahead and sing it. In the end, Michael did perform the song.
Michael Jackson was clearly a big admirer of Diana and had a lot of respect for her.
“I thought the princess was just wonderful,” Jackson told reporters at the time.
Knowing how much she cared about her sons, Michael also gave her two small tour jackets for her children, Princes William and Harry.
Diana, being a huge pop music fan, was said to have danced throughout the whole concert while Prince Charles just sat there.
WAS MICHAEL JACKSON IN LOVE WITH DIANA?
What a lot of people didn’t expect was that their first meeting in 1988 would start an extremely strong relationship.
“We were very close,” Jackson told German media in 1999. “She was extremely close by phone… I was still married to Lisa Marie [Presley]. Diana usually woke me up late at night… mostly after three in the morning! And then she talked to me for hours on the phone. She mostly talked about her children and the press.”
Michael claimed that Diana would keep him on the phone for ages.
“Lisa Marie used to get so jealous she would go into the other room, pick up the receiver and listen in,” he said.
Whether or not these late-night calls actually happened is still not proven. According to Diana’s friends who talked to The Express, Jackson supposedly never had Diana’s private number. If he called Kensington Palace, the staff were told not to put him through to the princess.