Bubbles Speaks

In a Daily Beast exclusive, Ben Montgomery meets Michael Jackson’s beloved chimpanzee, Bubbles, who is now retired and living the good life in Florida with other celebrity apes. Among the revelations: Bubbles didn't commit suicide, he wasn't cryogenically frozen, and he has not been told of Michael’s death.

Bubbles the chimp won't be at Michael Jackson's funeral Tuesday.

He won't emerge from the Staples Center wings wearing tiny overalls or moonwalk through the hot lights or cheese chimp-like for the cameras.

In fact, Bubbles doesn't even know Michael Jackson is dead.

No one has told him, and there is good reason.

Click Image to View Our Gallery of Bubbles

Bubbles lives 2,600 miles from Los Angeles, on a Florida ape preserve surrounded by swamplands and cattle fields and orange groves. He is 26 now and he makes his home most of the time in a giant enclosure surrounded by native ferns, banana trees, water oaks, hibiscus, and Florida maples. He has access to more than 4,000 feet of elevated tunnels connecting geodesic domes and large enclosures. He paints and watches television and gives piggy-back rides to smaller chimps, and when a woman comes each Sunday to play soft music on a recorder, he seems to enjoy it. He digs peanut butter out of bamboo shoots and sucks on frozen hemp milk and munches on mangoes and sweet potatoes and grapes.

He is a chimpanzee again, and if you don't mind, his caretakers would like to keep it that way.

"Michael has a special relationship with Bubbles." —Animal trainer Bob Dunn, People, 1987

Bubbles met the world in March 1986, when a 14-year-old heart-transplant recipient named Donna Ashlock emerged from Michael Jackson's estate with a souvenir.

A photo.

Ashlock is on the right, beside her hero, awestruck. Michael's in the middle, the early Michael, the pretty Michael, the pre-allegations Michael. He has a soft smile and his left arm is stretched around the little girl's shoulder. In his right arm sits a fully dressed chimp, clinging to Jackson like a big hairy baby. This photo is important because here stood the World's Biggest Star, sweet and innocent, mostly unaltered, still... normal. And here he was holding a chimp, like a giant question mark.

The story spread that Bubbles had been rescued from a lab and sold to a trainer who gifted the animal to Jackson. At first we thought: Well, we would own a baby chimp, too, if we could afford to indulge our desires. But before long, Bubbles was accompanying Michael to a pre-tour presser, drinking green tea with Japanese dignitaries, moonwalking for the media. In Japan, it was widely reported, Jackson had his hairy friend's hotel walls re-papered because Bubbles didn't like the smell of smoke. He went with Michael on a world tour and spent down time at Jackson's house (In his house? we wondered. Where did the chimp sleep?).

And in every public appearance, as Michael's eccentricities began to overshadow his musical accomplishments, we humanized Bubbles a little more.

Every time Michael spoke fondly of his chimp, we wondered what they were really up to.

"That's not so bizarre. It could be cocaine. Besides, I like the chimp, Bubbles. He's a funny little guy." —Quincy Jones, 1987

In 1989 came reports of Bubbles' untimely death: run over by a Jeep on Jackson's estate. (Not true.) A year later, the press speculated that Bubbles died when a fire tore through Jackson's Santa Barbara menagerie. ("Michael Jackson's pet chimp, Bubbles, is not dead," USA Today reported. "We repeat: Michael Jackson's pet chimp, Bubbles, is not dead.") The following year The Globe had Bubbles becoming a daddy and the papers reported he would be ring-bearer at Elizabeth Taylor's eighth wedding. (Sounds true, but no.)