Celebrities Pee in Cups and Have Genitals That Require Maps, Says Jacko Dermatologist
Self-proclaimed dermatologist to the stars Arnold Klein is not to be trusted, but he sure tells good stories, like the one about the time he rebuilt Michael Jackson's nose, and how celebrities like to pee in weird places.
Klein donned his very best sequin-enhanced suit for a 96-minute interview with TMZ last night. "I've flown to Tokyo to see a patient. I've flown to the Middle East to see patients, where Jews shouldn't go," he explained. He's treated Charlie's Angels and moguls' wives. He's treated famous singers.
Famous people are not like the rest of us. For one thing, they trust men like this with their corporeal well-being. But they have other peculiar practices, too, which Dr. Klein was only too happy to outline. Here are a few:
- If at first their faces don't succeed, they try, try again. When Klein last saw Jacko, he looked like crap, so "I rebuilt his face." It was so far gone "we blew it up" and started with a fresh slate. "That's why I rebuilt his nose. His nose looked perfectly normal [after he fixed it, in This Is It], right? Michael Jackson looked like a nose ... It's not like rebuilding Babylon, but you have to do a lot of work to do this."
- They like to pee in eccentric places. Asked how Jackson's alleged 1993 molestation victim was able to describe "in great details discolorations and markings in Michael Jackon's genitals," Klein doesn't miss a beat, first suggesting that the child had "studied the penis like studying a map," then offers an reasonable explanation for how the study session came about in the first place: "He pees in cups. I guess he was raised in a situation where they peed in a cups. I know a very famous country singer who pees in bed because it was the only way to keep herself warm in bed in the country."
- They do not get addicted to crystal meth. Meth, Dr. Klein explains, is physically not addictive. "I could give Michael meth." He had a long line of reasoning for this, which involved asking for a show of hands of who, on TMZ's set, had ever had tried crystal meth. Unfortunately, nobody raised their hands, so I guess we'll never know the secret to non-addictive methamphetamine, now.
- They get creative with skincare. Jacko had very bad acne. "Do you know how much acne he had?" Klein asks, full of indignation. "He wouldn't go to school. ... He used to love to go and scrub his face with Brillo. He thought it would cure his acne."
- They find Prince rather boring. Bad was supposed to be an M.J.-Prince duet, Klein says. But it fell through when Prince showed up at Jacko's house and wouldn't shut up. Guy just talked and talked and talked and then, when he finally left, Jacko didn't bother calling him back and the two-man version of the song never happened.