Me Elton John

by Elton John

  This time, I didn’t even make it to the car before I had a change of heart. It turned out to be the best show of all. The thought that I might never sing again carried me through it. The highlight was ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’. My voice was rough and raspy, but I don’t think I’ve ever performed that song better: it was always pretty show-stopping with the orchestra thundering away, but that night, every line seemed to have a new meaning, a different emphasis.

  After the tour, I went into hospital in Australia and had the operation. It couldn’t have gone better. There was no cancer. The cysts were removed. After I recovered, I realized that it had changed my voice for good, but I liked how it sounded. It was deeper and I couldn’t sing falsetto anymore, but there was something about the sound I liked. It felt more powerful, more mature; it had a different kind of strength. I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought 1987 had got off to a bad start, but now, the only way was up. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  * * *

  The first headline appeared in the Sun in February 1987 – ELTON IN VICE BOYS SCANDAL. But, in retrospect, it was always only a matter of time until the Sun came after me: I was gay, I was successful, I was opinionated, which in the Sun’s eyes made me fair game for a vendetta. Its editor at the time was called Kelvin MacKenzie, a man so toxic the Environment Agency should have cordoned him off. Under his control the Sun wasn’t really a newspaper so much as a spirited daily attempt to see how much racism, misogyny, xenophobia and, especially, homophobia could be crammed into sixty-four tabloid pages. It’s hard to get across to anyone who doesn’t remember the Sun in the eighties just how nasty it was. It treated people like shit, whether they were famous or not. It found a loophole in the law that enabled it to identify rape victims if no one had been arrested for the crime. It offered homosexuals money to leave Britain: FLY AWAY GAYS AND WE WILL PAY. When a TV actor called Jeremy Brett was dying of heart disease, the Sun sent journalists along to confront him in hospital and ask him if he had AIDS, a disease it also told its readers they couldn’t contract through straight sex.

  I read the story about me with my mouth hanging open. The irony was that there were dozens of men, all around the world, who could theoretically have sold a sex and drugs exposé on me: ex-boyfriends, disgruntled one-night stands. On the evidence of their first exposé, however, the Sun had managed to unearth someone I’d never actually met, who’d sold them a story about an orgy somewhere I hadn’t been – the home of Rod Stewart’s manager Billy Gaff.

  In fairness, though, had they found someone who had actually slept with me, they couldn’t have got a story like this. It wasn’t so much that it was completely fabricated, although it was. It was that it seemed to have been completely fabricated by a raving lunatic. I had allegedly readied myself for the orgy by donning a pair of ‘skimpy leather shorts’. Leather shorts? I’ve worn some ridiculous old tat in my time, but I’ve never, ever prepared for a night of passion by squeezing into a pair of leather shorts – you know, I’m trying to get someone to sleep with me, not take one look and run in the opposite direction, screaming. Furthermore, I was apparently ‘twirling a sex aid’ between my fingers and ‘looking like Cleopatra’. Ah, of course, Cleopatra: last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and history’s most celebrated dildo-twirler and wearer of leather shorts.

  On one level, it was laughable, but on another, it wasn’t funny at all. It was implying that the rent boys involved had been underage. If you repeat a lie often enough, people think it’s true, especially if it’s in print. What if people actually believed this? What the hell was I supposed to do? My mum and Derf were going to read this; maybe my grandmother. Oh God, Auntie Win: she had a job in a newsagent. I could imagine her taking delivery of that morning’s Sun, horrified; selling copies of it to people who knew who her nephew was and were laughing at her.

  My initial reaction was to just lock myself away in Woodside and hit the vodka martinis. Then I got a phone call, from Mick Jagger. He’d seen the story and wanted to offer some advice. He told me I shouldn’t, under any circumstances, try and sue them. When he’d issued a writ against the News of the World after they’d falsely claimed he’d bragged to an undercover reporter about his drug use in the sixties, they had reacted by spying on him and then setting up the famous drug bust at Redlands: he and Keith Richards had ended up in prison, before a public outcry caused their sentences to be overturned. Weirdly, the conversation had the opposite effect to the one Mick intended. As I pointed out to Mick, I didn’t really care what the press said about me. I’d occasionally get upset about a bad review or a hurtful remark, but that’s the way it goes if you put yourself in the public eye. You just have to suck it up and get over it. But why should I let them get away with telling lies about me?

  I could prove that what they were saying wasn’t true. On the date I was supposed to have been at Billy Gaff’s house, dressed up like an extra in a Village People video and waving a dildo around like a majorette, I had been in New York, having lunch with Tony King and discussing the finer points of my Tina Turner wig with Bob Mackie. There were hotel bills, restaurant receipts and plane tickets to prove it. I had the money to take them to court. Fuck them. I was going to sue.

  After I issued the first writ, the Sun published more and more stories, filled with more and more lies: every time one appeared, I issued another libel writ against them. Some of the lies were really unpleasant – they claimed I’d paid rent boys to let me urinate on them – and others were just bizarre. There was a claim I kept Rottweiler dogs with their voice boxes cut: ELTON’S SILENT ASSASSINS. The only problem with this story was that I didn’t own any Rottweiler dogs, only two German shepherds, both of whom nearly deafened the RSPCA when they came down to check on their welfare. The Sun kept going even when it became apparent that the public didn’t want to know. What they were doing clearly wasn’t affecting my popularity at all – the stories were reported all around the world, but the live album we’d recorded on the Australian tour was a huge hit, platinum in America, and the version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ released from it as a single unexpectedly went Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic. What they were affecting was the Sun itself. Every time they put a story about me on the front of the paper, the newspaper’s sales dipped. I don’t know whether people realized it was all untrue, or whether they saw it as a vendetta against me and thought it was unfair, or whether they were just bored stiff of hearing about it.

  Knowing they were in trouble, the Sun became increasingly frantic in their attempts to get something on me, anything that would actually stick. I was followed everywhere I went. When I stayed at the Century Plaza in Los Angeles, the penthouse suite was bugged. We had been warned by our solicitors that it might be – it was the suite where President Reagan always stayed – so we had the room swept by the FBI. Someone was trying to frighten me, trying to make me call the lawyers off. They offered to pay any rent boy £500 to say he’d slept with me. Not surprisingly, they were inundated with candidates, but they were all so obviously making it up that even the Sun baulked at using them.

  The best they could manage was to get hold of some Polaroids that had been stolen from my house. They were about ten years old. One of them featured me giving a guy a blow job. They printed them in the paper, which was mortifying. I tried to console myself with the thought that at least I could claim it as another first in my career – first artist in history to debut at the top of the US charts with two consecutive albums; first artist in history to have seven American Number Ones in a row; first artist in history to appear in a national newspaper giving someone a blow job. Besides, it seemed like a sign of desperation on the part of the Sun. Gay man sucks penis: it’s not exactly a Pulitzer-winning scoop. In addition, it was written up in a way that I couldn’t help but think told you more about the journalist than about me. It was all ‘disgusting’ this and ‘private perversion’ that. How boring does your sex life have to be for a blow job to count as th
e height of unimaginable depravity?

  It went on and on, for months and months, until I’d issued seventeen libel writs against them. I’d love to tell you that I never wavered in my conviction that I would defeat them, but it wasn’t like that. Some days I would be fine, righteously angry, ready to take them on. Other days I would be in tears, totally despairing, even ashamed. I hadn’t done any of the things they had said I’d done, but I knew I’d laid myself open to something like this happening. My drug use was an open secret. I certainly hadn’t slept with anyone underage, but then nor had I always been hugely discriminating in my choice of partners. A few years before, someone I slept with had helped themselves to a sapphire and diamond ring, a watch and some cash before they left. I worried about the court case, about having my private life dissected in public, about what the Sun would do to try and smear me.

  The thought of it made me do what I’d always done when things got too much. I would shut myself away in my room, just like I had as a kid when my parents were fighting, and try and ignore what was happening. The only difference was that now I would shut myself away with an abundant supply of booze and drugs. I wouldn’t eat for three days, then I would wake up starving and stuff myself with food. I would panic about gaining weight and make myself sick by jumping up and down until I puked. I had developed bulimia, although at the time I didn’t know what bulimia was. What I did know was that certain foods were easier to throw up straight away than others. Anything stodgy like bread was difficult; you ended up bent over the toilet, retching and retching. I realized that you had to stick to things that were soft, so my diet became bizarre. When I was bingeing, my idea of a meal became two jars of Sainsbury’s cockles and a pint of Häagen-Dazs peanut butter ice cream. I’d shovel it in then bring it up again, sneaking off to make myself sick, thinking that no one would notice. Obviously they did – you come back smelling of puke, looking as if you’ve been crying, because throwing up makes your eyes water – but of course no one would dare to confront me about it, for fear of the consequences. Everything about it, from what I ate, to how I behaved, seems completely disgusting now, but back then, it became second nature to me; it was just how I was.

  Still, when things got really bad, I would eventually pull myself out of it, consoling myself with two thoughts. One was that, as far as the Sun went, I was absolutely in the right – if a single word of what they had said was true, then I would never have dared sue them. And the other was that, however bleak things seemed, I knew of people far, far worse off than me, people who’d found the strength to deal with problems that made mine look completely insignificant. I’d first read a Newsweek magazine feature about an American teenager called Ryan White in a doctor’s waiting room a couple of years before. I was simultaneously horrified and inspired by his story. He was a haemophiliac from Indiana, who had contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, and AIDS was a disease that had been playing on my mind a great deal. John Reid’s PA Neil Carter was the first person I knew who died of it: he was diagnosed, then three weeks later he was dead. After that, the floodgates just seemed to open. Whenever I spoke to Tony King in America, where the epidemic was more advanced, he’d tell me of an old friend or a friend of a friend who was sick. John Reid’s secretary, Julie Leggatt, was the first woman in Britain to be diagnosed with AIDS. My ex-boyfriend Tim Lowe had tested positive. So had another ex, Vance Buck, a sweet blond boy from Virginia, who loved Iggy Pop and whose photo was on the inside cover of my album Jump Up!, just below the lyrics to ‘Blue Eyes’, the song Gary Osborne and I had written with him in mind. It was horrible, but ask any gay man who lived through the seventies and eighties and they’ll tell you a similar story: everyone lost someone, everyone can remember the climate of fear.

  But it wasn’t just the fact that Ryan White had AIDS. It was what had happened as a result of him contracting the disease. He had been ostracized in his hometown of Kokomo. The superintendent of his school district refused to let him attend classes, in case he infected his schoolmates. He and his mother Jeanne became involved in a protracted legal battle. When the Indiana department of education ruled in his favour, a group of parents filed an injunction to block his return: they were allowed to hold an auction in the school gymnasium to raise funds to keep him out. When that failed, they set up an alternative school, so that their children didn’t have to go near him. He was abused in the street, his school locker was spray-painted with the word FAG and his possessions were vandalized. The tyres on his mother’s car were slashed and a bullet was shot through the family’s front window. When the local paper supported him, they received death threats. Even their Methodist church turned its back on them: when it came to the blessing at their Easter service, no one in the congregation would shake Ryan’s hand and say ‘peace be with you’ to him.

  Throughout it all, Ryan and his mother Jeanne behaved with unbelievable dignity, bravery and compassion. Christians who truly held to the teachings of Christ, they forgave the people who made their already difficult lives even more hellish. They never condemned, they just tried to educate. Ryan became an intelligent, sympathetic, articulate spokesman for people with AIDS at a time when AIDS was still being demonized as God’s vengeance on gays and drug addicts. When I found out that he liked my music and wanted to meet me, I got in touch with his mother and invited them to a gig in Oakland, then took them to Disneyland the next day. I really adored them. Jeanne reminded me of the women in my family, especially my nan: she was working class, straight-talking, hard-working, kind but clearly built with an unbreakable core of steel. And Ryan seemed absolutely remarkable. He was so ill that I had to push him around Disneyland in a wheelchair, but he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bitter, he never cracked. He didn’t want pity or sympathy. Talking to him, I got the feeling that because he knew he didn’t have much time left to live, he didn’t want to waste it feeling sorry for himself or angry at others – life literally was too short. He was just a lovely kid, trying to lead as normal a life as possible. They were an incredible family.

  We kept in touch afterwards. I would call, send flowers, ask if there was anything I could do to help. Whenever I could see Ryan, I saw him. When they couldn’t stand it in Kokomo anymore, I loaned Jeanne the money to move her family to Cicero, a small town outside Indianapolis. I tried to just give her the money, but she insisted on it being a loan – she even wrote out a contract and made me sign it. Every time I felt hopeless about the situation I was in, I thought about them. That was real courage in the face of something truly appalling. So stop the self-pity. Just get on with it.

  Nevertheless, I kept a low public profile until Michael Parkinson got involved. I’d been on his chat show in the seventies – I’d ended up playing a pub piano while Michael Caine sang ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’ – and we’d subsequently become friends. He contacted me when the Sun’s stories first appeared and told me he had a new chat show on ITV called One to One – each episode was devoted to a single guest. Why didn’t I come up to Leeds and appear on it? I said I wasn’t sure, but he was persistent.

  ‘I’m not doing this for me,’ he said, ‘I’m doing this for you. I know you, I know what the Sun are like. You’re not saying anything publicly, and you need to. If you don’t say anything, people will assume you’ve got something to hide.’

  So I eventually did the show. If you look at the clips of it on YouTube, you can see the effect that events were having on me. I was unshaven, dressed down, I looked haggard and pale. But it went well. The audience were clearly on my side. Michael asked about the Sun and I told him that I’d just discovered they had tried to bribe the receptionist at my doctor’s to hand over my medical records.

  ‘I think they want to examine my sperm,’ I said. ‘Which is odd, because if you believe the stories they’ve been printing, they must have already seen bucketloads of it.’

  Not long afterwards, the rent boy who had made the initial allegations in the Sun told another tabloid that he had made them all up, and that he
’d never met me. ‘I don’t even like his music,’ he added. The morning the first libel case was due to come to court, the Sun completely caved in. They offered to settle for £1 million. It was the biggest libel payout in British history, although it was a good deal for them – if it had gone to court, they would have ended up paying me millions. That night, rather than prepare to take my turn in the witness box, I went to see Barry Humphries at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and laughed myself stupid at Dame Edna Everage. Afterwards, we waited around in the West End to see the first edition of the next morning’s paper arrive at the news stands. When forced to apologize for making things up, the Sun was notorious for printing the correction as small as possible and burying it on here. But I said their apology had to be the same size as the initial allegations – a banner headline, front page: SORRY ELTON.

  People subsequently said it was a landmark victory that changed British newspapers, but I’m not sure that it changed the Sun very much. Two years later, they printed the most notorious load of lies in their history, about the behaviour of Liverpool fans during the Hillsborough disaster, so it’s not as if checking their facts suddenly became a huge priority. What did change was the way newspapers behaved around me, because they realized I would sue them if they made things up. I did it again a few years later, when the Daily Mirror claimed I’d been seen at a Hollywood party telling people I’d found a wonderful new diet, then chewing food and spitting it out instead of swallowing it: ELTON’S DIET OF DEATH. I hadn’t even been in America at the time. I got £850,000 and gave it to charity. The money wasn’t the point. The point was to make something very clear. You can say whatever you like about me. You can say I’m a talentless, bald old poof, if that’s your opinion. I might think you’re an arsehole for saying it, but if it was against the law to express colourful opinions about people, I’d have been locked up years ago. But you can’t tell lies about me. Or I’ll see you in court.