by Elton John
I’d made the worst decision of my life, but I didn’t realize it then. By contrast, the problems in my relationship with John were staring me in the face. I said before that I was incredibly naive about gay relationships. One thing I didn’t know was that John thought it was perfectly acceptable to have sex with other people, behind my back. Open relationships are a lot more common among gay men than straight couples, but that’s not what I wanted. I was in love. When he realized that, it didn’t stop him being promiscuous, it just made him dishonest about it. That led to some really humiliating scenes. John vanished during a party at the director John Schlesinger’s house in LA. I went looking for him and found him upstairs, in bed with someone. My mum rang me up on tour to tell me that she’d popped round to the house in Virginia Water and discovered John was hosting a sex party in my absence. I’d confront him, there would be a huge row, things would calm down and then he’d go out and do exactly the same thing again. Or, worse, he’d come up with some new variant on sleeping around that seemed designed to send me even more hysterical. I found out he’d gone to a film premiere, picked up a famous TV actress and started an affair with her. Her. So now he was fucking women as well. What was I supposed to do about that particular twist in our relationship?
It went on and on and on, and it was miserable. I seemed to spend half my life in tears over his behaviour, but it made absolutely no difference. So why didn’t I leave him? Partly it was out of love. I’d fallen head over heels for John, and when you’re like that with someone who cheats, you’ll make any excuse for them, over and over again, kid yourself that this time they really mean it and from now on it’s going to be OK. And, in his own way, John really did love me. He was just completely incapable of keeping his dick in his pants if left to his own devices.
I also stayed because I was scared of him. John had a temper that could easily spill over into violence, especially if he’d been drinking or doing coke. Sometimes his rages were unwittingly funny. I’d ring the offices of Rocket and ask to speak to him: ‘Oh, he’s not here. He lost his temper and tried to throw an electric typewriter down the stairs. But it was still plugged in, so that didn’t really work. Which made him even more angry, so he fired the entire staff and stormed out. We’re just wondering whether we should go home or not.’ But most of the time, they weren’t funny at all. I watched John threaten someone with a broken glass at a party hosted by Billy Gaff, Rod Stewart’s manager. He hit a doorman outside a hotel in San Francisco after an argument about parking a car. He punched a sound engineer in front of a room full of American journalists at the launch of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. When we were touring in New Zealand in 1974, he threw a glass of wine in the face of the local record label promotions guy when the party they’d thrown for me ran out of whisky. When a female reporter from a local paper tried to intervene, he punched her in the face. Later the same night, at a different party, I got into an argument with another local journalist over the earlier incident, which I hadn’t actually seen happen. John came flying across the room, knocked him to the floor and started kicking him.
The next morning, we were both arrested and charged with assault. I was acquitted, charged $50 costs, paid up and got out of New Zealand as quickly as possible. I left without John, who had his appeal for bail turned down and was eventually sentenced to twenty-eight days in Mount Eden prison. I flew home without him. His behaviour was completely indefensible, but it was an era in which the line between tough-guy rock manager and thug was frequently blurred – look at Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin – and as I waited in on a Saturday night for his weekly call from prison, I somehow managed to construct a version of events in my head where he was the injured party, acting nobly in my defence, aided by his claim that the female journalist had called him a poof before he hit her, as if that justified it.
It wasn’t until John hit me that I came to my senses. It happened the night we threw a fancy dress party at Hercules. I can’t even remember what the argument was about, probably the latest episode in John’s catalogue of cheating, but it started before the guests even got there and became more and more heated. There was shouting, doors were slammed, and a beautiful art deco mirror that Charlie Watts from The Rolling Stones had given us got smashed. Then John dragged me into the bathroom and punched me in the face, hard. I reeled backwards. I was so shocked, I didn’t retaliate. He stormed out and I looked in the bathroom mirror. My nose was bleeding and my face was cut. I cleaned myself up and the party went ahead as if nothing had happened. Everyone had a great time – Derf turned up in drag, Tony King arrived completely covered in gold paint, like Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. But something had happened and, to me, it felt like a switch had finally been flicked off. I couldn’t make excuses for John’s behaviour any longer. I couldn’t stay with someone who hit me.
I really don’t think John expected me to tell him it was over. Even after he moved out, to a house on Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge, and I asked my mum and Derf to help me find a place to live on my own – I literally didn’t have time to go house-hunting myself – I think he was still in love with me. I got the sense that if I’d asked him to come back, he would have been there like a shot. But I didn’t want him back. I wanted him to stay as my manager, but everything else about our relationship changed. The balance of power shifted: until then, he’d been the dominant personality, but after we broke up as a couple, I became more confident and assertive. He took on other acts as a manager – not just musicians, comedians like Billy Connolly and Barry Humphries – but our business relationship still worked, because I knew how astute he was, and how great his ear was for music. One morning, at the offices in South Audley Street, he said he wanted to play me something by one of his new clients that was going to be a huge hit all over the world. We listened to the song and I shook my head, incredulous.
‘You’re not actually going to release that, are you?’
He frowned. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Well, for one thing, it’s about three hours long. For another, it’s the campest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. And the title’s absolutely ridiculous as well.’
John was completely unfazed. ‘I’m telling you now,’ he said, lifting the test pressing of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ off the turntable, ‘that is going to be one of the biggest records of all time.’
But if Queen’s most famous song sailed over my head at first, I got Freddie Mercury straight away. From the minute I met him, I loved him. As was tradition, he got given a drag name: Melina, after Melina Mercouri, the Greek actress. He was just magnificent. Incredibly smart and adventurous. Kind and generous and thoughtful, but outrageously funny. Oh God, if you went out clubbing with him and Tony King – they were great friends – you’d spend the whole night howling. No one was spared, not even the other members of Queen: ‘Have you seen the guitarist, darling? Mrs May? Have you seen what she wears onstage? Clogs! Fucking clogs! How did I end up onstage with a guitarist who wears fucking clogs?’
And not Michael Jackson, who Freddie called Mahalia, a name I don’t think Michael found anywhere near as hilarious as Freddie did. He had incurred Freddie’s wrath by trying to interest him in his menagerie of animals, and Freddie had turned retelling the story into a tour-de-force performance that rivalled anything he did onstage. ‘Oh, darling! That dreadful llama! All the way to California to see Mrs Jackson and she leads me out into the garden and there’s the llama. Then she asks me to help get it back into its pen! I was wearing a white suit and I got covered in mud, and eventually I had to shout at her: “For fuck’s sake, Mahalia, get your fucking llama away from me!” Oh,’ he would add, shuddering for comic effect, ‘it was a nightmare, darling.’
six
I first met John Lennon through Tony King, who had moved to LA to become Apple Records’ general manager in the US. In fact, the first time I met John Lennon, he was dancing with Tony King. Nothing unusual in that, other than the fact that they weren’t in a nightclub, there was no music playing and T
ony was in full drag as Queen Elizabeth II. They were at Capitol Records in Hollywood, where Tony’s new office was, shooting a TV advert for John’s forthcoming album Mind Games, and, for reasons best known to John, this was the big concept.
I took to him straight away. It wasn’t just that he was a Beatle and therefore one of my idols. He was a Beatle who thought it was a good idea to promote his new album by dancing around with a man dragged up as the Queen, for fuck’s sake. I thought: We’re going to get on like a house on fire. And I was right. As soon as we started talking, it felt like I’d known him my entire life.
We began spending a lot of time together, whenever I was in America. He’d separated from Yoko and was living in Los Angeles with May Pang. I know that period in his life is supposed to have been really troubled and unpleasant and dark, but I’ve got to be honest, I never saw that in him at all. I heard stories occasionally – about some sessions he’d done with Phil Spector that went completely out of control, about him going crazy one night and smashing up the record producer Lou Adler’s house. I could see a darkness in some of the people he was hanging out with: Harry Nilsson was a sweet guy, an incredibly talented singer and songwriter, but one drink too many and he’d turn into someone else, someone you really had to watch yourself around. And John and I certainly took a lot of drugs together and had some berserk nights out, as poor old Dr John would tell you. We went to see him at the Troubadour and he invited John onstage to jam. John was so pissed he ended up playing the organ with his elbows. It somehow fell to me to get him offstage.
In fact, you didn’t even need to go out to have a berserk night in John’s company. One evening in New York, we were holed up in my suite at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, determinedly making our way through a pile of coke, when someone knocked at the door. My first thought was that it was the police: if you’ve taken a lot of cocaine and someone unexpectedly knocks at the door, your immediate thought is always that it’s the police. John gestured at me to see who it was. I looked through the spyhole. My reaction was a peculiar combination of relief and incredulity. ‘John,’ I whispered. ‘It’s Andy Warhol.’
John shook his head frantically and drew his finger across his throat. ‘No fucking way. Don’t answer it,’ he hissed.
‘What?’ I whispered back. ‘What do you mean don’t answer it? It’s Andy Warhol.’
There was more knocking. John rolled his eyes. ‘Has he got that fucking camera with him?’ he asked.
I looked again through the spyhole and nodded. Andy took his Polaroid camera everywhere.
‘Right,’ said John. ‘And do you want him coming in here taking photos when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?’
I had to concede that I did not. ‘Then don’t fucking answer it,’ whispered John, and we crept back to doing whatever we were doing, trying to ignore the continued knocking of the world’s most famous pop artist.
But I genuinely never encountered that nasty, intimidating, destructive aspect of John that people talk about, the biting, acerbic wit. I’m not trying to paint some saintly posthumous portrait at all; I obviously knew that side of him existed, I just never saw it first-hand. All I ever saw from him was kindness and gentleness and fun, so much so that I took my mum and Derf to meet him. We went out to dinner, and when John went to the toilet, Derf thought it would be a great joke to take his false teeth out and put them in John’s drink: there was something infectious about John’s sense of humour that made people do things like that. Jesus, he was so funny. Whenever I was with him – or even better, him and Ringo – I just laughed and laughed and laughed.
We became so close that when his ex-wife Cynthia brought their son Julian to New York to see him, he asked me and Tony to chaperone them on their voyage over. We travelled to America on the SS France, this gorgeous old ship, on its last voyage from Southampton to New York. Most of my band and their partners came too. The other passengers were quite snooty towards us – these rich, enormous American women saying things like, ‘He’s supposed to be famous, but I’ve never heard of him,’ whenever I walked past them – but in fairness, I had dyed my hair bright green and brought suitcases filled with suits by the designer Tommy Nutter that were so loud they could permanently damage your hearing. I could hardly complain about attracting attention, adverse or otherwise. They liked me even less when I won the bingo one afternoon, not least because I got overexcited and screamed ‘BINGO!’ at the top of my voice. I subsequently discovered that the correct way to signify that you’d won on board the SS France was to graciously and demurely murmur the word ‘house’. Well, that’s not how they teach you to play bingo in Pinner, baby.
I didn’t care. I was having a blast: playing squash, going to the terrible cabaret shows, which for some reason always ended with a rousing singalong of ‘Hava Nagila’. Midway through the journey, I got a ship-to-shore call telling me that my latest album, Caribou, which had been released in June 1974, had gone platinum. And I was writing its follow-up. Bernie had come up with a set of songs about our early years together: they were all in sequence and they kind of told our story. They were beautiful lyrics. Songs about trying to write songs. Songs about no one wanting our songs. A song about my stupid failed suicide attempt in Furlong Road and a song about the weird relationship we had developed. The latter was called ‘We All Fall In Love Sometimes’. It made me well up because it was true. I wasn’t in love with Bernie physically, but I loved him like a brother; he was the best friend I’d ever had.
The lyrics were even easier than usual to write music for, which was just as well, because they’d only let me use the music room for a couple of hours a day during lunch. The rest of the time it was occupied by the ship’s classical pianist. When I turned up, she would leave with a great display of weary altruism, then head to a room directly above it and immediately strike up again. Sometimes she’d have an opera singer with her, who was the star turn at the aforementioned terrible cabaret. So I’d spend two hours trying to drown them out. That was how Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was written. I’d write a song – or sometimes two – every day during lunch break, to the accompaniment of an aggrieved pianist hammering away through the ceiling. And I’d have to remember them. I didn’t have a tape recorder with me.
In New York, we stayed at the Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue. John Lennon was in the suite above mine, and called down. He wanted to play us the rough mixes of his new album. Moreover, he wanted me to play on two of the songs, ‘Surprise Surprise’ and ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’. The second track sounded like a hit, even more so a couple of nights later when we went to the Record Plant East studio, just off Times Square. The overdub engineer was Jimmy Iovine, who ended up becoming one of the biggest music moguls in the world, but John produced it himself and he worked really quickly. Everyone thinks of John as someone who spent ages in the studio experimenting, because of Sergeant Pepper and ‘Strawberry Fields’, but he was fast, and he got bored easily, which was right up my street. By the time we were finished, I was convinced it was going to be Number One. John wasn’t: Paul had had number one solo singles, George had had number one solo singles, Ringo had had number one solo singles, but he never had. So I said we’d have a bet – if it got to Number One, he had to come onstage with me. I just wanted to see him play live, which he’d hardly done at all since The Beatles split up; a couple of appearances at benefit gigs and that was it.
To his credit, he didn’t try to shirk the bet when ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ did make Number One, not even after he travelled up to a show in Boston with Tony to see what he was getting himself into. I came onstage for the encore wearing something that basically resembled a little heart-shaped chocolate box with a tunic attached to it, and John turned to Tony, looking a bit aghast, and said, ‘Fucking hell, is this what rock and roll’s all about nowadays, then?’
But he still played with us at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving 1974, on the condition that we made sure Yoko didn’t come:
they were still estranged. Of course, Yoko turned up anyway – which I have to say is very Yoko – but Tony made sure her tickets were out of the sightline of the stage. Before the show, she sent John a gardenia, which he wore in his buttonhole onstage. I’m not sure whether that was what made him so nervous beforehand, or if it was just because he didn’t know what to expect when he walked out. But either way, he was suddenly terrified. He threw up before the show. He even tried to get Bernie to come onstage with him, but to no avail: Bernie always hated the limelight, and not even a desperate Beatle could convince him to change his mind.
In my whole career, I’ve honestly never heard a crowd make a noise like the one they made when I introduced him. It just went on and on and on. But I knew how they felt. I was as giddy about it as they were, so were the rest of the band. It was probably the highlight of our careers to that point, to have someone like that share a stage with you. The three songs flew by, and he was off. He came back for the encore, this time with Bernie in tow, both of them playing tambourines on ‘The Bitch Is Back’. It was fabulous.
