I’m very sorry about the passing of Rev. Jesse Jackson.
He suffered a long time from Parkinson’s and other related problems. The last time I saw him was four years ago when we sat together at Clive Davis’s 90th birthday dinner. He really couldn’t speak, but he managed to tell me he missed Aretha Franklin, our old mutual friend.
In 2015, Aretha invited a small group of people to accompany her to Philadelphia to meet Pope Francis. She sang for him, we met him backstage, and after — at the ungodly hour of 1am — in a small, private dining room, Rev. Jackson gave a talk about his long friendship with Aretha and her father.
I wish I had taped what he said. I wrote about it the next day. It was one of the most magnetic, beautiful, and impassioned tributes I’d ever heard in my life. When Jesse and Martin Luther King and civil rights activists came to Detroit, they stayed with the Franklins. When they needed help during their fabled marches, Aretha was there for them. It was an astounding moment because Rev. Jackson was the king of speechifying. His sonorous voice rose and fell as he spoke, and he held the 20 or so of us in thrall.
It’s funny to think about now, but we knew each other a long time. When the Michael Jackson jury was deliberating in June 2005 in Santa Maria, California, Rev. Jackson and I had a drink together in a local hotel bar. There may have been signs of the Parkinson’s then. He was exhausted after giving interviews defending Michael on all the TV stations. Rev. Jackson knew how to find the spotlight. He was present whenever TV cameras were on and could interject himself for PR purposes. But he also meant every word of it.
In the hotel bar, he was not too tired to scope out the ladies and do a little flirting. He had a long history of that. So in 2023, when I was at a performance of the Broadway play, “Purpose,” I knew instantly that the play was about him and his family. It was thinly veiled. In fact, Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King were sitting across the aisle from me, and at intermission this was the number one topic.
Jesse Jackson never reached the heights of Dr. King, but he was incredibly important at “keeping hope alive,” and standing up against racism at time when he was the lone voice out there. Seeing him diminished in later years, it was sad, because at his best he’d been a raging lion who now leaves quite a legacy. I was very honored to know him.
