Michael Jackson wrote some pretty catchy songs during the six to nine months in the early Eighties when he was actually kind of cool. But somehow, “Thriller” and “Billie Jean” don’t quite make up for the fact that the King of Pop was so hopelessly freaky-deaky he could make any normal human being crawl out of their skin. The latest proof of his epic weirdness: he tried to make Bubbles the Chimp talk. (A few years from now, when How Weird Was Michael Jackson? is finally published, this story will appear in Volume 6, page 914.) Michael’s sister LaToya revealed the whole story in an interview with News of the World, generally a pretty dubious source but in this instance thoroughly credible. Originally Michael wanted to have human vocal cords implanted into his simian pal. When he was convinced that wouldn’t work, he settled on a more rational plan of action:

But doctors warned that the operation could harm his hairy pal as it had never been tried before…. But he persisted for FOUR YEARS with his dream – and splashed thousands more flying in ape experts to try to help his pet to speak. Although the sessions worked well, Bubbles could muster no more than an occasional bark or grunt.

Be honest: is there any story about Michael Jackson, any story at all, that you’d dismiss out of hand as being implausibly bizarre? A tabloid could report that Michael spent years working in his basement to create the prototype for a line of Michael Jackson sexbots modeled on his prepubescent Jackson Five self, and the only question in most readers’ minds would be how much Papa Joe planned to collect in royalties on the project.