A Leap Of Faith

His 1987 blockbuster made him a global icon. By 1992, he’d sued his record company and turned his back on pop stardom. “He had principles,” says his former manager.

- Rob Tannenbaum

GEORGE MICHAEL HAD TWO STRONG RECURRING premonitions. The first was that he’d be famous. The second was that he’d die young.

“From a really early age, I believed I was going to be a star,” he told me when I interviewed him at length in 1986. “I remember being on a bus when I was a child, about 8 or 9. I’d had a bad day at school — I’d been picked on — and I remember thinking it would be OK when I was older, because I wasn’t going to be like everybody else. That’s the reason kids want to be stars. They think they’ll be able to rise above their problems because they’re famous — which obviously isn’t true.”

Michael, who died at home in Oxfordshire, England, at the age of 53 on Christmas Day, had enduring faith in his talent. But one of the most striking things about him was the discrepancy between the poised, clever sex symbol I was talking to and his accounts of growing up outside London. “People have no comprehension of what I looked like as a kid,” he said, laughing. “I was such an ugly little bastard.”

Even when fans were swooning over him, he remembered being an overweight kid who wore glasses. “He never thought he was good-looking,” Rob Kahane tells Billboard. Kahane managed the singer at the height of his solo stardom. “When he looked in the mirror, he’d still see a pudgy, homely kid.”