Tustin Woman Made Michael Jackson's Funeral Invitation

Calligrapher Karen Jewell was surprised to be offered the job by his family.

PETER LARSEN The Orange County Register

Photos Of Invitations Below

Click here for a closeup look at Michael Jackson's funeral invitation and the woman who made it.

The e-mail landed in Karen Jewell's inbox on a Sunday night three weeks ago, and as the calligrapher and invitation designer started to read, for a moment it seemed unreal.

"It said, 'Hi, we have a very confidential thing we're doing for Michael Jackson's burial, would you be interested in helping?'" Jewell said of the message she received. "So I was like, oh my gosh, this is for real?"

She quickly typed the names at the bottom of the message into her computer, and lo and behold, Dennis Tompkins and Michael Bush turned out to be Jackson's costume designers for the past 25 years.

Jewell wrote back, playing it cool and professional – I'll be in my office at 9 a.m. tomorrow, feel free to contact me then – but once that phone call came, the eight days that followed were anything but calm and orderly.

The top-secret assignment revealed to her the next day was daunting:

Can you create an 8-page invitation for Jackson's long-delayed funeral, design it with all the luxury and style befitting the King of Pop, address each envelope by hand with ornate calligraphy – oh, and can you have it all done in a week?

Gulp …

Sure!

And off to work she went.

Jewell learned calligraphy in the '60s as a teenager growing up in Grants Pass, Ore., though for years it was mostly a hobby she loved as she tried to make it as an actress and singer in Los Angeles.

By the mid-'80s, though, she was ready to leave those dreams behind, and so she opened a wedding invitation and calligraphy business in Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles, working for clients both well-heeled and well-known. Her Web site is Calligraphytothestars.com in a nod to that start, though eventually she settled in Orange County to raise her kids and run Karen Jewell Fine Invitation from her home office in Tustin.

"If you want something done right, you have to hire a professional," Jewell says when asked why she thinks the Jackson representatives contacted her.

It also seems that the job scared off a few invitation designers, too. "I asked them later and they said, 'Oh, we contacted a few people, and they didn't' want to take it on,'" Jewell says.

And even with Jewell's 25 years in the business, the Michael Jackson burial invitation was a tall order: an embossed cover, multiple photographs, with gold, black and red the colors to be used. With no time to special order anything, Jewell rushed to the local businesses she normally used to see what they had in stock.

Kelly Paper in Tustin had a pearlized paper in stock that would work, she decided. Avanti Printing in Irvine agreed to take the job on short notice, though because of the complexity and size of the job, Primary Color in Costa Mesa eventually joined in.

Her daughters, Kacie Sloan and Kristin Jewell, also chipped in, with Kacie taking on some graphic design and Kristin staying up late to help assemble the complicated invitations.

"We were busy assembling those day and night," Jewell says.

Finally, eight days after she agreed to take the job, more than 160 hand-addressed envelopes and admission cards, Jewell was done.

At noon on Tuesday, Sept. 1, she drove up the 605 Freeway to rendezvous with Taunya Zilkie, her Jackson family contact (and the girlfriend of Michael's brother Randy), meeting at a gas station halfway to deliver the invitations.

"I came home and collapsed," she said. "But then I got on Facebook and told everybody about it, because I was on a high – my 15 minutes of fame was over."

Well, actually not quite.

Jewell had given the family two leather-bound condolence books to use at the ceremony, and also purchased silver pens for guests to use to sign their names and write a short remembrance. The books were delivered with the invitations, but the pens had been forgotten back home in Tustin.

And so on Thursday, Sept. 3, she found herself rushing to Forest Lawn Glendale to meet an escort up to the site where services would soon be held. Singer Gladys Knight was doing her sound check and Jewell says she briefly met the Rev. Lucious Smith who later would speak at the services.

"They were gracious, kind, even though they're in their grief and their sorrow," Jewell said of the Jackson family, who she believes were guided to her by a divine hand, and who invited her and a few of her crew to the post-funeral gathering at a Pasadena restaurant. "They cared about me because I cared about them.

"That's how Michael was. Michael was always for the fans, always for the common guy. And that's how they were with me – (Zilkie) wanted to include all of us."

A week after the services, after the invitation she designed has appeared everywhere from CNN to eBay (note to would-be buyers: Jewell initialed the backs of all the invitations she made, a mark she says is missing from some she's seen online), life is settling back to normal, Jewell says.

"It's like a dream to me right now," she says. "It hasn't really hit me. But I just have to put my nose to the grindstone and not get all star struck. And hope that the phone rings again – I haven't gotten a job in a week!"

Photos Below