Liar Tatum in her first autobiography in 2004:
" Michael would just keep on, thinking he was talking to me. . At 13 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. 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, which is why I’m amazed by his recent claim on national TV that I’d seduced him but he was too shy to carry it through. I absolutely adored Michael–as a friend–and I admire him to this day. I believe that he fell in love with me. I’m told that he wrote the song “She’s Out of My Life” on his album Off the Wall for me. What an honor.
At the time of the supposed seduction, I was barely pubescent, and what I’d seen of sex so far was unappealling & gross. It may have been Michael’s fantasy that I’d seduce him–and it’s a little sad that he cast himself as failing, even in his dream–but it just didn’t happen.
Unfortunately, my friendship with Michael came to an abrupt ending. He’d played the Scarecrow in The Wiz, the urban remake of the Wizard of Oz, which starred Diana Ross as Dorothy. For the film’s premiere, Michael invited me to be his date. I asked my dad, who didn’t care one way or another if I went, but my talent agency was dead set against it. I was told, in exactly these words: ‘You can’t go to a premiere with a ni**er.’ Hollywood!
That upset me tremendously. Had I been old enough–or had I the parental support–I could have stood my ground & insisted ‘Oh yes, I can.’ But my father was too disengaged to help me think it through. So, without telling Michael the reason, I turned him down. He was devastated. After that Michael didn’t speak to me for years, until I ran into him at the Helmsley Palace in New York. For old times’ sake, we caught a concert together, Kool and the Gang at Madison Square Garden. Michael dressed in full costume for the event–coming in blackface, with a pasted-on beard–the whole nine yards. But things were never the same between us.”
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