Entertainment

Bubbles, tigers, and a llama in the studio: the tumultuous animal life of Michael Jackson

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Now that the biopic Michael is filling the cinemas and everyone is once again captivated by the King of Pop, the stories that you won't find in history books are also surfacing, but which perhaps say the most about who he really was. Michael Jackson loved animals, immensely. Not as a decorative piece or status object, he saw them as his family. After seeing the film, we are all curious about how Bubbles is doing (and about the photo of Bubbles and Jafar, I wrote about that here and with Louie the Llama and the rest of his collected zoo. So sit back because there is a lot of drama involved here.

Bubbles: the most famous chimpanzee in the world

Michael Jackson rescued Bubbles in the early eighties from a biomedical research center in Texas, a place where the little chimpanzee was born for scientific research. Jackson bought him through an animal trainer in Hollywood and took him home to the family estate in Encino.

What followed was a friendship that the world did not see coming. Bubbles went on tour, was Jackson's plus-one at the wedding of his lawyer John Branca, and drank green tea with Japanese officials during the Bad World Tour in 1987. More specifically: Bubbles shared a hotel room with Michael in Tokyo and drank tea with the mayor of Osaka, Yasushi Oshima, who later said that he and his colleagues were “surprised to see the chimpanzee, but understood that he is Michael's good friend. This was the first time an animal entered the city hall.” They wore matching red military outfits. There are also photos where you see Michael sitting at a lunch table with a banana sticking out of his pocket, which he had tucked away for Bubbles.

At Neverland, Bubbles slept in a crib in Michael's own bedroom. As he grew larger, too large actually, he first moved to animal trainer Bob Dunn and later, in 2005, to the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, where he still lives today. Nowadays he paints, leads his chimpanzee group with calm confidence, and receives thirty thousand dollars annually from the Jackson estate. He is now forty-three years old. The sanctuary describes him as “artistic, gentle, and shy” and one of the most beloved residents among the staff. In the new biopic, Bubbles is not played by a real chimpanzee but by CGI, which PETA explicitly praised.

Louie the llama and Freddie Mercury

Then there is the story you can tell at every birthday party that always works. Michael Jackson had two llamas at Neverland Ranch, Lola and Louie. In 1983, he and Freddie Mercury worked together on demo recordings in the studio. Michael brought Louie along. At one point, Freddie called his manager Jim Beach with the words: “Miami, can you please come and get me out of here? I'm recording with a llama.” The recordings were never completed. That had not only to do with Louie, but mainly with the fact that Michael was super punctual and Freddie Mercury was always late, which drove Michael completely crazy, so he called it off. How amazing would that have been, a duet with Michael and Freddie. But unfortunately.

Elizabeth Taylor, an elephant, and a wedding at Neverland

The elephant Gypsy, an Asian elephant, was a gift from Elizabeth Taylor. She gave it to Michael in 1991 after he had made Neverland Ranch available for free for her wedding to Larry Fortensky. By the way, that was her seventh husband and her eighth marriage in total because she married Richard Burton twice, but that's beside the point. Later, an African elephant named Ali also joined the residents of Neverland. At that time, Michael Jackson already had four giraffes, Princess, Annie Sue, Rambo, and JJ, two tigers, a bear, a boa constrictor that went to interviews, alligators, a crocodile, llamas, and rabbits that roamed freely across the grounds.

Animals as home

What few people know is that most animals at Neverland were not bought as attractions. They were predominantly rescued animals: abandoned specimens, older animals, former circus animals, show animals that had nowhere else to go. Michael Jackson researched their care himself, knew their backgrounds, and worked very closely with veterinarians. Tippi Hedren, founder of the Shambala Preserve in California and mother of Melanie Griffith, took in his two tigers Thriller and Sabu when he had to part with his animals in 2005. When asked about their condition, she was brief and clear: they were absolutely fantastically cared for.

Jackson once said about it: “Everything I love is behind those fences. We have elephants, giraffes, crocodiles, and all kinds of tigers and lions.” And Neverland was not just his own world. Through Make-A-Wish and schools from disadvantaged neighborhoods, thousands of children visited the grounds over the years, many of them for the first time in their lives so close to a giraffe or an elephant.

The sad ending

Not all stories end well. When Jackson definitively left Neverland in 2005, he had to give up his animals. The seven alligators and the crocodile ended up in the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma. In March 2015, a severe fire broke out there, officially deemed arson. The reptile enclosure burned down. Only Big Al, the largest alligator, survived the fire and died years later at an old age.

And Bubbles still doesn't know

The perhaps most silent detail in this whole story: Bubbles was never told that Michael Jackson died in 2009. His caretaker at the sanctuary said at the time that Bubbles surely missed Michael when they parted ways, and that he would still miss him. In Florida, he now paints colorful canvases, only returning them to his caregivers when he feels they are finished, and occasionally throws some sand at the visitors. Forty-three years old, retired, and still the most famous chimpanzee on earth. And oh, perhaps the truth about Michael should just be spared from him.

The biopic Michael is now playing in theaters. I'm going for the third time soon. Don’t stop ‘till you get enough, right?