Fancy meeting you here

Hello Goodbye Hello

A Circle of 101
Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

Simon & Schuster

When Michael Jackson turned up to meet Madonna for the first time at the Los Angeles hotspot The Ivy in 1991, Jackson was already less than impressed with her, having told confidantes, “I don’t get it. She’s not a great dancer or singer. But she does know how to market herself. That must be it.”

But Madonna’s efforts to win Jackson over took a bigger hit when, shortly after they sat down, she grabbed the Gloved One’s legendary sunglasses, pulled them off his face, and threw them across the room.

“I’m your date now,” she said. “And I hate it when I can’t see a man’s eyes.”

“Hello Goodbye Hello,” the juicy new book by British journalist Craig Brown, is celebrity gossip with a six degrees of separation twist. Brown researched 101 get-togethers between various celebrities, politicians and royalty, and wrote about each in exactly 1,001 words. He linked all consecutive tales, so that a participant in one carries over to the next. In between, he details affairs and feuds, surprising couplings and awkward engagements, and even a burning hatred or two.

In the case of Jackson and Madonna, the sexpot starlet further inflames the King of Pop when, after supposedly catching him peeking at her breasts, she “snatches his hand and places it upon them,” having an effect on Jackson of “instant queasiness.”

The next story involves Jackson and Nancy Reagan, who meet when the White House presents the singer with an award in exchange for permission to use his “Beat It” for an anti-drunk-driving campaign.

After the ceremony, Jackson is to have a private meeting with the first couple and some of their staffers’ children. But when he enters the room and finds 75 adults, he freaks out, runs into a nearby bathroom and locks the door.

“They said there would be kids. But those aren’t kids!” he tells his manager through the door, refusing to emerge until the adults are gone.

The Reagans pick up the thread, as Andy Warhol visits the White House for an Interview magazine story. He’s at his cattiest after he’s ushered into a reception area and served nothing but water.

“She could have done it in a good room. She could have used the good china!” Warhol wrote. “I got madder and madder thinking about it.”

Though not quite as mad as Jackie Kennedy got at him in 1978 for bringing an uninvited guest to one of her parties. Warhol thought Kennedy was worried that this guest would spread gossip about something “disgusting” Warren Beatty had done in a hallway at her most recent soiree (Warhol doesn’t know what), and she retaliates by making Warhol persona non-grata at her parties from then on.

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