‘Little House on the Prairie’ Star Melissa Gilbert Once Had Dinner With Michael Jackson and the Story Is So Bizarre
Melissa Gilbert has been a celebrity since childhood, so it’s not surprising that she’s rubbed elbows with many famous folks over the years. Her story about a dinner that involved Michael Jackson just might be the most bizarre, however.
Melissa Gilbert had dinner with Michael Jackson
In Gilbert’s memoir Prairie Tale, the Little House on the Prairie star got into some interesting stories about her life and there’s a lot of meaty stuff she’s seen and done.
For instance, Gilbert was having dinner with Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, and Liza Minnelli at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant back in the day when Jackson entered the scene. Perhaps most interesting, she shared, was that he only said a handful of words after sitting quietly at the table the whole evening.
“Then Michael Jackson walked in,” Gilbert wrote. “He came straight to our table and sat down just as dinner was served. Wolfgang kept sending over food, and everyone talked — except for Michael Jackson. Other than his kiss-kiss with Liza, he didn’t say a word. Nothing.”
She continued, “We finished dinner and were nearly through dessert when we began talking about what to do next and where we should go. Ideas were tossed around. All the options were nixed and everyone ran out of ideas at the same time. The table fell silent.”
“And that’s when Michael finally spoke the only words he would say the entire evening,” Gilbert recalled. “’You can come to my house,’ he said. ‘I got a llama.’”
Gilbert didn’t go to Jackson’s house, however
During a 2014 appearance on Watch What Happens Live, Gilbert was asked about the dinner gathering and she filled in some more of the details.
“Forget six degrees of Kevin Bacon, I feel like one could play ‘Six Degrees of Melissa Gilbert’ and it would yield similar results,” host Andy Cohen said.
He continued, “You wrote in this book about a crazy dinner you had with Michael Jackson and Liza Minnelli once.”
“…and Andrew McCarthy,” Gilbert added. “We went to Sammy Davis Jr.’s house…” and then on to her agent’s apartment.
According to Gilbert, McCarthy and Minnelli were making out because they were drunk. She also saw Minnelli without a wig, dishing, “she had four hairs on her head.”
In her book, she noted that Jackson “didn’t want to go” with them to Davis Jr.’s house, so his part of the story ended after dinner. The evening got so bizarre that Gilbert was ready to leave.
“That was it for me,” she wrote about seeing McCarthy and Minnelli making out. “I said to Rob, ‘What is Android (our nickname for him) doing?’ Rob said he didn’t have a clue, but agreed with me that it was definitely time for us to get the heck out of there.”
“So we drove home laughing uncontrollably as we recounted the crazy events of the evening,” she added.
Rob Lowe asked Melissa Gilbert to remove one thing about him from her book
Lowe is referenced a lot in Gilbert’s book due to their on-again/off-again relationship, so Cohen wondered what his reaction to the book was.
During a game called “Melissa Spill-bert,” she answered Cohen’s question, noting how Lowe asked for just one thing to be removed from her memoir.
“He asked me to take out the word ‘pretty’ when I referred to him,” she explained. “That was it … ‘Just could you do one thing? Please don’t call me ‘pretty’? I hate it when people call me pretty.’”
