And later on, there was no way you could match the sheer oddity of being Michael Jackson: the court cases; the baby dangling; the weird disguises; the face, that constantly morphing face.

Which meant that in the press, in the later years, more often than not, he was treated as the idiot savant of pop music. Precious little was devoted to the man and his music. Then again, by that point, there wasn’t much music to write about. But there was a man in trouble, and for that, it’s sad to say, he provided plenty of copy.

Seven years ago, Michael agreed to do a rare cover interview for Vibe. At the time, he was in avoid-the-press mode; with the exception of Oprah Winfrey and Diane Sawyer, he wasn’t talking to anybody. But for some reason, he said yes to Vibe—on one condition: Regina Jones had to do the interview. So Jones headed up to Neverland, which was, as she remembers it, one big fun house. Michael was very sweet and childlike, she says, joking about their shared past. Until, that is, she asked a question that bothered him. She asked him about his plastic surgery.

“His immediate, hostile response was, ‘That’s a stupid question,’” Jones remembers. “And then he kept talking. ‘We’re family, why would you ask that? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ I’ll never forget that. And I felt ashamed of myself, and I told him that. But I told him that I was there to do an interview.”

Toward the end of his life, Michael sought out the spotlight again, trying halfheartedly to recapture the glory days. He fired his old management and hired his one-time publicist, Raymone Bain—whom he’d fired during his 2005 child molestation trial—as his business manager. I profiled Bain for the Washington Post. Michael was in Ireland at the time—although he wasn’t saying that he was there—and through his personal assistant, he agreed to talk to me by phone. We set up a time. But then his assistant called to say that Michael preferred to talk by fax. Except that, as it turned out, the fax was broken. His assistant ended up e-mailing answers to my questions. Let’s just say that I don’t believe for a minute that Michael ever even looked at the questions.

Cat and mouse. Michael won.

So I never got to interview Michael, unless you count that quick minute in front of the elevator. Now, I never will. But as I write this, I’m taken back to my first real introduction to Michael, to my first real Michael Jackson story.

It was 1970, and I was a little brown girl living in Staten Island, N.Y., an integration baby struggling with a boatload of identity issues. I was a lone raisin in a sea of oatmeal. Until, that is, my parents brought home a record for me: The Jackson 5’s “ABC.” I held the album cover, staring at those cute brown boys with the fabulous ‘fros. I might even have kissed Michael’s picture, I loved him that much. And then I put “ABC” on the turntable, and shook, shook, shook my body down to the ground.

I’ve always found it ironic that the boy who helped me to really appreciate that black was indeed beautiful grew into a man who didn’t seem to see that in himself.

Teresa Wiltz is The Root’s senior culture writer.

Read more King of Pop coverage on Newsweek.com .