Insiders Reveal The Sad Truth Behind Michael Jackson's Appearance
While Michael Jackson’s reputation lives on in a mixture of both infamy and glory, there is plenty about the iconic artist that remains unclear. One of the most looming questions centers around his dramatically changing appearance over the years. From the smiley, afro-haired Black boy in The Jackson Five, Michael transformed into a vaguely unsettling, porcelain white doll-like man. He may have denied ever having had much cosmetic work done, but ever since he passed away, insiders have been revealing a grim truth. Were the motivations behind altering his face with surgery rooted in childhood abuse and trauma?
The boy who chose not to grow up
Growing up with Joe Jackson as the head of the household wasn’t an easy experience for Michael. Joe’s singing and dancing sons were his meal ticket, and Michael was performing and recording albums from the age of five.
In his teens, he would come to realize he had been robbed of a normal childhood, and as an adult, he would do anything he could to recapture it. As his confidante Rabbi Shmuley said, “Some argued that Michael was a case of arrested development. I disagree. Michael Jackson chose not to grow up.”
He wanted to be a kid, but had to work
Schmuley conducted 30 hours of candid interviews with the King of Pop and published them in The Michael Jackson Tapes in 2009. Michael told a heartbreaking tale of the loneliness and envy he’d felt as a famous child who just wanted to be a normal kid.
At his core, all Michael had wanted were friends he could hang out with. He told Schmuley, “I wanted so badly to play in the park across the street because the kids were playing baseball and football, but I had to record.”
He felt trapped by the music business
Michael continued, “I could see the park, right across the street. But I had to go in the other building and work until late at night making the albums. I sat there looking at the kids with tears running down my face.”
He continued, “I would say, ‘I am trapped, and I have to do this for the rest of my life. I am under contract.’ But I wanted to go over there so bad it was killing me, just to make a friend to say, ‘Hi.’”
As an adult, he would try to befriend strangers
Michael went on to reveal that, when he was a 24-year-old pop icon recording his seminal Thriller album, he was still crippled by loneliness. He told Schmuley, “I used to walk the streets looking for someone to talk to.”
He added, “I was so lonely I would cry in my room upstairs. I would think, ‘That’s it. I am getting out of here,’ and I would walk down the street. I remember really saying to people, ‘Will you be my friend?’”
Fame is a double-edged sword
Naturally, these people would be astonished by just about the most famous man in the world approaching them in the street and asking to be their friend. Still, even if they agreed to it, he would then become paranoid about their motives.
He admitted, “They were like, ‘Michael Jackson!’ I would go, ‘Oh God! Are they going to be my friend because of Michael Jackson? Or because of me?’” He didn’t want friends who were simply attracted to his fame. Rather, he “just wanted someone to talk to.”
Kids were the only ones who didn’t care about his fam
The people to whom Michael found it easiest to relate — and the ones who weren’t interested in his fame — were children. He told Schmuley, “I went to the park and there were kids playing on swings.” The Rabbi asked, “So that’s when you decided that children were the answer. They are the only ones who treat you as a person?”
This seemed to strike a chord: Michael replied, “Yeah. That’s true.” In his eyes, he was simply enjoying the childhood he’d never had. But, in later years, his relationships with kids would prove extremely problematic.
Joe Jackson was abusive to his children
In truth, Michael’s childhood had been defined by his father’s hard-line attitude, both at work and at home. Joe would push his boys incredibly hard to perfect their singing and nail their elaborate dance routines, and if they made mistakes, he would be physically abusive.
Michael’s friend J. Randy Taraborrelli revealed the pop superstar had told him, “If you messed up during rehearsal, you got hit, sometimes with a belt or a stick. Once, he ripped the flex off the refrigerator and whopped me with it.”
Michael was regularly beaten by his father
Michael claimed his father had once purposely tripped him up when he was entering a room. When the young boy hit the floor, bruised and bloodied, his father allegedly told him, “That's for what you did yesterday. And tomorrow, I'm gonna get you for what you'll do today.”
Taraborrelli also told the Daily Mail that, when Michael had fought back by throwing his shoe at his dad, Joe yelled, “Are you crazy? Boy, you just signed your own death warrant.” He’d then held his crying son upside down by one leg and beaten him senseless.
Joe provoked fear and hatred in Michael
Joe would reportedly also frighten his children in order to teach them lessons. Taraborrelli claimed, “To teach his sons not to leave their window open at night, he’d climb into their bedroom screaming, his face hidden by a mask, pretending to be a burglar.”
He added, “For years, Michael and his brother Marlon had nightmares of being kidnapped from their beds.” Michael would also tell Taraborrelli, “'I began to be so scared of that man. In fact, I guess it’s safe to say I hated him.”
Michael’s mom was powerless to help to her sons
Michael told Rabbi Schmuley that his mother would make vain attempts to stop her husband beating their children but was rarely successful. He said, “She was always the one in the background when he would lose his temper — hitting us and beating us.”
He continued, “I hear it now. ‘Joe, no, you are going to kill them. No! No, Joe, it’s too much,’ and he would be breaking furniture and it was terrible. I always said if I ever have kids I will never behave like this way. I won’t touch a hair on their heads.”
Michael vowed to never be like his father
This ethos was vitally important to Michael as he grew older and became a dad himself. He stressed to Schmuley, “People always say the abused abuse, and it is not true. It is not true. I am totally the opposite.”
He added, “The worst I do is I make them stand in the corner for a little bit and that’s it, and that’s my time out for them.” He added, “I always promised in my heart that I would never be this way, never.”
Michael has a physical reaction to his father’s presence
The mental scars of his childhood abuse stayed with Michael well into adulthood, as did his deep, abiding fear of his father. He revealed, “I am scared of my father to this day. My father walked in the room — and God knows I am telling the truth — I have fainted in his presence many times.”
Distressingly, Michael also claimed, “I have thrown up in his presence because when he comes in the room and this aura comes and my stomach starts hurting, and I know I am in trouble.”
According to Michael, Joe’s love wasn’t unconditional
Michael also grew up believing that his father’s love had been contingent on him and his brothers being successful in music. The icon claimed, “One day he said, ‘If you guys ever stop singing, I will drop you like a hot potato.’ It hurt me.”
He continued, “You would think he would think, ‘These kids have a heart and feelings.’ Wouldn’t he think that would hurt us?” He then added, “You don’t say something like that to children, and I never forgot it. It affects my relationship with him today.”
Joe never fully understood why Michael was afraid of him, though
While Michael admitted his father had changed his ways in old age, the pop star still struggled to see him as anything other than his childhood abuser. He revealed, “Time and age has changed him, and he sees his grandchildren and he wants to be a better father.”
He went on, “It is so hard for me to accept this other guy that is not the guy I was raised with,” adding, “One day he said to me, ‘Why are you scared of me?’ I couldn’t answer him. I felt like saying, ‘Do you know what you have done to me?’”
The King of Pop’s teen years were plagued by acne
As Michael grew up, stuck between the limelight and an abusive home, he became increasingly self-conscious about his looks. Like many teenagers, he suffered from acne, which was hidden on and off-stage with makeup.
All the same, over time he became so self-conscious about it that he would avoid being seen in public and wouldn’t look at people when they were talking to him. He reportedly told Taraborrelli that worrying about the acne “messed up my whole personality.” He became sullen and withdrawn.
Michael hated his nose
Acne wasn’t the only thing that troubled teenage Michael about his looks, though: he was also obsessed with his nose. He was sure it was too large and too wide, and this wasn’t helped by his brothers — and father — making fun of him with the nickname “Big nose.”
From a very young age, he would tell people that he wanted to have plastic surgery on his nose, but for years he was too scared to commit to the procedure.
He saw himself as a work in progress
In 1979 though he tripped on stage and broke his nose, which necessitated an operation to fix it. At only 21, Michael had his first rhinoplasty, and he loved how it looked. In 1981 he had his second nose job; this was followed by a third in 1984 and by 1986 he was on his fourth.
He reportedly told one of his assistants that the “greatest joy I ever had was in knowing I had a choice about my face,” and he would always say his looks were a “work in progress.”
Why was he so obsessed with altering his nose?
Over the years, friends, family, and fans would rack their brains to figure out why Michael was so obsessed with changing his nose. After all, by the time he passed away in 2009, it was estimated by expert plastic surgeons that he had endured as many as 20 nose jobs in his lifetime.
Some believed he was trying to make himself look more like his idol Diana Ross. But perhaps his true motivation had been to look less like someone who’d made his life a living Hell?
Was it to make himself look less like his father?
Taraborrelli claimed to the Daily Mail, “It was so that he would look less like his father, the man who had so mistreated him and whose strong, broad-nosed face he saw looking back at him from the mirror.”
Another unnamed source told the National Enquirer, “Michael was elated about the fact that with the second nose job he looked less like his father. If he couldn’t erase Joe from his life, at least he could erase him from the reflection in the mirror.”
Did Michael have body dysmorphia?
As the years went by and Michael committed to more and more cosmetic procedures, though, the people close to him tried to intervene. For instance, his pal Jane Fonda — the legendary Hollywood leading lady —had reportedly told him, “I want you to stop. No more surgery. Love yourself the way you are, for who you are.”
He told her he would try, but ultimately her pleas fell on deaf ears. It’s likely Michael had been suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, so he would never be happy with how his nose looked.
Eventually, his nose started to wear away
“Michael viewed his nose like an anorexic views the body,” a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon told Allure in 2009. “No matter how tiny his nose was, it was always too fat. He perceived it as opposite of what we saw.”
In 2009 a source told People magazine that the continual procedures eventually wreaked havoc on Michael’s face. They claimed, “His nose became so small because he was operated on repeatedly. He has barely anything left for a nose.” At this point, a rescue operation was mounted.
Dr. Klein works his magic on Michael’s disappearing nose
Dermatologist Dr. Arnold Klein was tasked with saving Michael’s nose. In 2009 he appeared on Larry King Live and revealed, “I rebuilt it using fillers. I used hyaluronic acids, and they worked very well. It’s an arduous procedure because you don’t want to put too much in.”
He added, “And you have to do it exactly, so you can flow the material so it’s perfectly smooth.” His efforts helped re-open the breathing passages in Michael’s nose, which had closed over due to “a total collapse of the cartilage.”
“You name it, he had it”
As his obsession with plastic surgery tightened its grip on Michael, though, it wasn’t just his nose he sought to perfect. In fact, he went under the knife countless times to “fix” other perceived facial failings.
Dr. Wallace Goodstein, who worked on Michael in the ‘90s, told People, “He came in approximately every two months. It was about ten to 12 surgeries in two years, while I was there.” He claimed the singer “had multiple nose jobs, cheek implants, and he had a cleft put in his chin. He had eyelid surgery. You name it, he had it.”
Plastic surgery became a clandestine mission
An intensely private man who also paradoxically lived his life in the full glare of the media, Michael insisted his cosmetic surgeries be conducted in a cloak-and-dagger manner. A source claimed to People, “They were done in the evening when personnel had to come in so no one else in the office could see him going in or out.”
After the chin procedure, he began sporting a surgical mask in public. The press speculated he had become a germaphobe, but it was more than likely he was simply covering up surgical scars.
Michael begins to look stranger and stranger
By this time, Michael’s appearance had veered into bizarre territory. As Taraborrelli put it, “His new chin seemed oddly out of place with his soft, ingenue’s face. His nose was slimmer than ever and pointing upwards.”
Unfortunately, though, there was another aspect of Michael’s changing look which was even more alarming than his nose. His skin, once a medium brown, kept getting lighter and lighter as the years went on. By the time the ‘90s rolled around, it had transformed into an unnaturally porcelain shade of white.
Some in the Black community weren’t happy
Naturally, the public couldn’t understand what was happening with Michael’s skin. It led to rampant speculation that he was intentionally bleaching it, and prominent Black voices accused him of sending a bad message to young people of color.
Psychologist Dennis Chestnut worried that Michael was showing Black youths they needed to be eccentric and weird to be successful. Even more harshly, Halford Fairchild claimed Michael would encourage other Black celebrities “to look more like white people in order to get in films and on television.”
Oprah “goes to see the wizard”
In 1993 Michael sat down with Oprah Winfrey for an interview, after 14 years of refusing to give one. It was broadcast live to an audience of 90 million people. This was the biggest audience that had ever tuned in for a television interview.
Oprah went to Michael’s home turf — Neverland Ranch — to conduct the chat, and in 2009 she admitted, “We are coming in the gates of Neverland, and it's like a moment in The Wizard of Oz. It was literally like going to see the wizard… I felt like a kid.”
Living vicariously through children
Once again, Michael spoke of how he felt denied of a real childhood. He mused, “I remember going to the recording studio, and there was a park across the street, and I'd see all the children playing and I would cry. It would make me sad that I would have to go to work instead.”
He continued, “People wonder why I always have children around. It's because I find the thing that I never had through them. Disneyland, amusement parks, arcade games — I adore all that stuff because when I was little, it was always work, work, work.”
Michael wished he could understand his dad
The conversation then moved on to Michael’s father, and Oprah has admitted she was surprised by how candidly the superstar had spoken on such a touchy topic. When Oprah asked if Michael knew why his father had abused him, he theorized, “I don’t know if I was his golden child or whatever it was.”
He continued, “Some may call it a strict disciplinarian or whatever, but he was very strict. He was very hard. Just a look would scare you.” He added, “I love my father, but I don't know him… I just wish I could understand my father.”
He denied bleaching his skin
After this, talk turned to the subject the world had been waiting for: Michael’s ever-whitening skin tone. He flatly denied bleaching his skin, claiming, “As I know of, there is no such thing as skin-bleaching. I've never seen it. I don't know what it is.” Yet as Oprah revealed in 2009 his skin hadn’t just been white — it was almost translucent.
She said, “He had absolutely no pigmentation in his skin — you are looking at his veins when you look at his hand… At first that’s a startling thing. Nobody ever talks about that, but it takes you aback at first.”
Michael claimed to suffer from vitiligo
Michael did offer up a reason for his lily-white appearance, though. He claimed to suffer from vitiligo, a condition which affects pigment production and causes patches of uneven color tone. He explained, “It is something I cannot help.”
He added, “When people make up stories that I don’t want to be who I am, it hurts me. It’s a problem for me. I can’t control it. But what about all the millions of people who sit in the Sun to become darker, to become other than what they are. Nobody says nothing about that.”
A proud Black American
Michael also pushed back against critics saying he was trying to become more “white.” He told Oprah, “I’m a Black American, I’m proud to be a Black American, I am proud of my race, I am proud of who I am.”
In fact, Michael’s outlook on race — which some may call overly simplistic — was outlined in a 1988 letter. It read, “Maybe I look at the world through rose-colored glasses, but I love people all over the world. That is why stories of racism really disturb me… I believe all men are created equal.”
His body was speckled with vitiligo spots
In truth, Dr. Klein had actually diagnosed Michael with vitiligo as far back as 1983. And over the years, the medic had to figure out the best way to treat the problem. Dr. Klein later told People, “His was bad, because he began to get a totally speckled look over his body.”
Dr. Klein emphasized the white patches were “all over his body, but on his face significantly [and] on his hands, which were very difficult to treat.” As for treatment, he revealed, “You have one choice where you can use certain drugs and ultraviolet light treatments to try to make the white spots turn dark.”
Did the treatment turn Michael fully white?
Unfortunately, Michael’s vitiligo “became so severe, that the easier way is to use certain creams that will make the dark spots turn light so you can even out the pigments totally.” Industry insiders believe Dr. Klein had been using hydroquinone derivatives which over time left Michael with a uniformly pale tone.
Dr. Klein argued, “That’s ultimately what the decision had to be. He would have to wear heavy, heavy makeup on stage, which would be ridiculous. And he couldn’t really go out in public without looking terribly peculiar.”
Once again, Michael denied extensive plastic surgery
When Oprah asked Michael about plastic surgery — the other topic people were on the edge of their seat awaiting — he claimed he’d had fewer procedures than people imagined. In fact, he was adamant, “You can count them on two fingers.”
He admitted to having his nose worked on — which would have been impossible to deny — but added, “I have never had my cheekbones done, never had my eyes done, never had my lips done.” Poignantly, though, he confessed, “I try not to look in the mirror. I'm never happy with what I see.”
Michael’s autopsy report
Tragically, Michael died in 2009 from an overdose of a surgical anaesthetic his doctor had been administering to treat insomnia. Fascinatingly, his autopsy report starkly revealed the truth about his plastic surgery history and his skin coloring, and it finally gave fans some concrete answers to some of his mysteries.
For starters, the report confirmed once and for all that Michael had suffered from vitiligo. The coroner wrote about “focal depigmentation of the skin, particularly over the anterior chest and abdomen, face, and arms.”
He also had cosmetic tattoos
The autopsy also revealed Michael had several cosmetic tattoos on his face. For instance, his lips were tattooed pink, and eyebrows tattooed black, and he also had a dark tattoo on his head which covered up a bald spot.
It was theorized that this patch had been caused by an accident which occurred while shooting a 1984 Pepsi commercial, when Michael’s hair had been set on fire by a magnesium flash bomb which exploded too close to his head. This finding confirmed that Michael had worn wigs in public from that point on.
His face revealed scars from several plastic surgeries
Finally, the report showed that Michael had a number of small scars on his face — two behind his ears and, crucially, two on either side of his nostrils. It was concluded that they were scars left behind by cosmetic procedures.
So Michael had more than likely not been entirely truthful about the plastic surgery he’d had over the years. A source told The Sun, “Injection marks all over his body and the disfigurement caused by years of plastic surgery show he’d been in terminal decline for some years.”
A sad end for a global icon
It was a sad end for an icon who could never rid himself of his demons. Still, in 2007 — two years before he died — Michael had told fans in Tokyo, “I’ve been in the entertainment industry since I was six years old. As Charles Dickens says, ‘It’s been the best of times, the worst of times.’”
He went on, “I would not change my career. While some have made deliberate attempts to hurt me, I take it in stride because I have a loving family, a strong faith, and wonderful friends and fans who have, and continue, to support me.”