Me Elton John

by Elton John

  It didn’t take an unexpected visit from Michael Jackson to make the world David was entering seem completely bizarre. I could make it seem that way myself, without any help from the self-styled King of Pop. Rehab had curbed most of my worst excesses but not all of them: the Dwight Family Temper seemed particularly resistant to any kind of treatment or medical intervention. I was still perfectly capable of throwing appalling tantrums when I felt like it. I think the first time David really saw one up close was the night in January 1994 when I was due to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York. I didn’t want to go, because I don’t really see the point of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I loved the original idea of it – honouring the true pioneers of rock and roll, the artists who laid the path in the fifties that the rest of us followed, especially the ones who got ripped off financially – but it quickly became something else entirely, a big televised ceremony with tickets that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s just about getting enough big names involved each year to put bums on seats.

  The smart thing would have been to politely decline the invitation, but I felt obliged. I was being inducted by Axl Rose, who I really liked. I had got in touch with him when he was being ripped apart in the press: I know how lonely it can feel when the papers are giving you a kicking, and I just wanted to offer some support. We got on great and ended up performing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ together at the Freddie Mercury Tribute gig. I got a lot of flak for that, because a Guns N’ Roses song called ‘One In A Million’ had homophobic lyrics. If I’d thought it reflected his personal views, I wouldn’t have touched him. But I didn’t – I thought it was pretty obvious the song was written from the point of view of a character who wasn’t Axl Rose. It was the same with Eminem: when I performed with him at the Grammys, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation gave me a really hard time, but it was obvious that his lyrics were about adopting a persona – a deliberately repugnant persona at that. I didn’t think either of them were actually homophobes any more than I thought Sting was actually going out with a prostitute called Roxanne, or Johnny Cash actually shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

  So I went along to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As soon as I got there, I decided I’d made a mistake, turned round and left, ranting all the way about how the place was a fucking mausoleum. I dragged David back to the hotel, where I immediately felt guilty for blowing them out. So we went back. The Grateful Dead were performing with a cardboard cut-out of Jerry Garcia, because Jerry Garcia wasn’t there: he thought the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a load of bullshit, and had refused to attend. I decided Jerry had a point, turned round and left again, with David dutifully in tow. I had got out of my suit and into the hotel dressing gown when I was once more struck by a pang of guilt. So I got back into my suit and we returned to the awards ceremony. Then I got angry at myself for feeling guilty and stormed out again, once more enlivening the journey back to the hotel with a lengthy oration, delivered at enormous volume, about what a waste of time the whole evening was. By now, David’s sympathetic nods and murmurs of agreement were starting to take on a slightly strained tone, but I convinced myself he was probably rolling his eyes like that at the manifest failings of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rather than at me. This made it easier to decide – ten minutes later – that all things considered, we had better go back to the ceremony yet again. The other guests looked quite surprised to see us, but you could hardly blame them: we’d been backwards and forwards to our table more often than the waiting staff.

  I’d like to tell you it ended there, but I fear there may have been another change of heart and furious return to the hotel before I actually got onstage and accepted the award. Axl Rose gave a beautiful speech, I called Bernie up onstage and gave the award to him, then we left. We drove back to the hotel in silence, which was eventually broken by David.

  ‘Well,’ he said quietly, ‘that was quite a dramatic evening.’ Then he paused. ‘Elton,’ he asked plaintively, ‘is your life always like this?’

  I suspect nights like that got David interested in making Tantrums and Tiaras, although it was my idea to begin with. A film company wanted to make a documentary about me, but I thought it would be more interesting if it was made by someone close to me, who had access I would never give anyone else. I didn’t want a load of whitewashed bullshit, I wanted people to really see what it was like being me: the funny parts, the ridiculous aspects. And I got the feeling David wanted the world to know what he had to put up with. It was like a way of making sense of this insane life that he’d become part of, that had become his life, too. So he set up a little office in the tram I’d bought in Australia – you see, I knew it would come in useful one day – and started filming.

  I wasn’t afraid about people seeing the monstrous, unreasonable side of me. I’m perfectly aware how ridiculous my life is, and perfectly aware of what an arsehole I look like when I lose my temper over nothing – I go from nought to nuclear in seconds and then calm down just as quickly. My temper was obviously inherited from my mum and dad, but I honestly think that, somewhere within them, every creative artist, whether they’re a painter, a theatre director, an actor or a musician, has the ability to behave in a completely unreasonable way. It’s like the dark side of being creative. Certainly, virtually every other artist I had become friends with seemed to have that aspect to their character too. John Lennon did, Marc Bolan, Dusty Springfield. They were wonderful people, and I loved them to bits, but everyone knows they all had their moments. In fact, Dusty had so many that she told me she’d worked out the secret of throwing a tantrum successfully: if you got to the stage where you started hurling inanimate objects around the room, you had to make sure you didn’t hurl anything that was expensive or difficult to replace. I’m just more honest about it than a lot of people, especially these days. Today, record labels give pop stars media training; they literally school them to try and cover up any flaws in their character, to never say anything out of line.

  You don’t have to be an expert on the subject of my career to know that I come from a different era, before anyone thought pop stars needed to be told what they should and shouldn’t say to the media. I’m really glad, even though I’ve said things that have caused a lot of controversy and kept newspapers in articles head-lined THE BITCH IS BACK for decades. It probably was a bit cruel to say that Keith Richards looked like a monkey with arthritis, but, in fairness, he’d been pretty foul about me: he got as good as he gave. The only time I caused real trouble was when I told an American Sunday newspaper magazine called Parade that I thought Jesus might well have been a very intelligent, super-compassionate gay man. I just meant that no one really knows anything about Jesus’s personal life, and that you can extrapolate all sorts of ideas from his teachings about forgiveness and empathy. But the religious nuts didn’t take it that way: the big idea they seemed to have extrapolated from Jesus’s teachings was that you should go around inciting people to kill anyone who says something you don’t like. I ended up with officers from the Atlanta police force sleeping in my guest room for a week. There were protesters outside the apartment building, waving banners, one of which said ELTON JOHN MUST DIE – not really what you want to see on your doorstep when you come home of an evening. The guy holding it posted a video on YouTube threatening to kill me. He ended up being arrested, and the protests died down.

  Even so, I still think a world in which artists are coached not to say anything that might upset anyone and are presented as perfect figures is boring. Furthermore, it’s a lie. Artists aren’t perfect. No one is perfect. That’s why I hate whitewashed documentaries about rock stars where everyone’s telling you what a wonderful person they were. Most rock stars can be horrible sometimes. They can be fabulous and charming and they can be outrageous and stupid, and that’s what I wanted to show in Tantrums and Tiaras.

  Not everyone thought it was a good idea. George Michael watched some of the footage and he was horrified: not because of what h
e saw – he already knew what I was like – but because I was actually going to put it out. He thought it was a terrible mistake. John Reid said he was on board with the idea, but then quietly went around trying to sabotage the whole project. After my mother agreed to be interviewed for it, he went behind my back and told her not to get involved because it was just going to be about sex and drugs.

  I was furious about that, but I didn’t care what other people thought. I usually can’t stand to watch myself in anything, but I loved Tantrums and Tiaras, because it was real. David and the producer Polly Steele just followed me around on my 1995 world tour with little Hi-8 camcorders, and most of the time I forgot I was being filmed. It’s hilarious: me making these completely ridiculous threats, screaming that I’m never coming to France again because a fan waved at me while I was trying to play tennis, or that I’m never making another video because someone’s inadvertently left my clothes in the back of a car. Watching it was cathartic, and I think the shock of seeing myself changed the way I behave – well, that and a lot of therapy. I’ve still got a temper – you can’t change your genes – but I’m a lot more aware of what a waste of energy it is, how completely stupid I feel once I’ve calmed down, so I try to keep it in check: admittedly with varying degrees of success, but at least I’m making an effort.

  In fact, the only thing I regret about Tantrums and Tiaras is how influential it became. It really spawned that whole genre of reality TV where you see into a celebrity’s life, or worse, someone who’s become a celebrity for being on reality TV. You know, it’s not exactly the most edifying thing having Being Bobby Brown and The Anna Nicole Show on your conscience. There’s a sense in which Keeping Up with the Kardashians might ultimately be my fault, for which I can only prostrate myself before the human race and beg their forgiveness.

  * * *

  Tantrums and Tiaras was finally released in 1997: David was coming back from a press conference in Pasadena for its American launch when I found out Gianni Versace had been murdered. I had bought a house in Nice and Gianni was meant to be flying out to France to have a holiday with David and me the following week – the tickets were booked – when a serial killer shot him outside his mansion in Miami: he’d already murdered men in Minnesota, Chicago and New Jersey and was supposed to have become obsessed with Gianni after meeting him briefly at a nightclub years before, although I don’t think anyone knows whether he actually met him or not.

  When John Reid rang and told me what had happened, I completely went to pieces. I turned on the TV in the bedroom and sat there, watching the coverage, bawling. Gianni had been out doing his morning routine. Each day, he got every international paper, every magazine. There were always piles of them lying around his house, with Post-it notes all over them: ideas that had caught his attention, things he thought he could work with, stuff he found inspiring. And now he was dead. It was like John Lennon’s death – there was no explanation, nothing whatsoever about it that made it any easier to comprehend, no way of rationalizing it in your head, even slightly. Another random murder.

  His family asked me to perform at his memorial service, at the Duomo in Milan. They wanted me to duet with Sting: the 23rd Psalm again, the same piece I’d sung in the cathedral in Sydney after John died. The service was mayhem. There were paparazzi everywhere, film crews and photographers even in the church. It was claustrophobic but, in a weird way, it’s what Gianni would have wanted. He loved publicity, to the point where it was the one thing about him that drove me up the wall. You would go on holiday with him to Sardinia, and every single place you went, Gianni’s PR people would have rung up the press beforehand and tipped them off. I’d tell him I hated it, but he didn’t get that at all: ‘Oh, Elton, but they love you, they want to take your picture, is beautiful, no? They love you.’ At the cathedral, two officials – monsignors or cardinals or whatever they were – called me and Sting out in front of the congregation and started quizzing us about our performance: I think they didn’t really want us to sing because we weren’t Catholics. It was horrible, like being dragged out before the school by the headmaster at assembly but in the middle of a memorial service in a church filled with TV cameras and flashes going off.

  We were eventually allowed to sing and got through the performance, which was a miracle. I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being look so beside themselves with grief as Allegra, Gianni’s little niece. She was eleven when he died, and he doted on her: he left his share of the business to her in his will. She somehow blamed herself for his death, because she used to go and get the papers with him every morning, but the morning he died, she’d been in Rome with her mum. She thought that if she had been with her uncle, he wouldn’t have been killed. After his death, she developed a terrible eating disorder. She would go missing and they would find her hiding in wardrobes in the house, clutching his old clothes, things that still smelt of him. It was awful. Just awful.

  In fact, the whole Versace family went to pieces after Gianni’s death. Donatella had always had a cocaine problem. Everyone knew, except Gianni. He was incredibly naive about drugs. He didn’t even drink: he would have a glass of red wine and put Sprite and ice cubes in it, which I imagine tastes revolting enough to put you off investigating alcohol any further. At Versace events, he would go to bed early, and then the party would really start, with Donatella leading the charge. He realized that something was wrong with her, but he couldn’t work out what it was. I remember walking around the garden at Woodside with him, listening to him going, ‘I don’t understand my sister – one day she’s good, one day she’s bad, she has moods, I don’t understand it.’ I told him that she was a cocaine addict, that I’d done coke with her many times before I got clean. He couldn’t believe it – he had no inkling whatsoever of what her life was like when he wasn’t around.

  But after his murder, Donatella’s coke use got completely out of control. I didn’t see much of her – she was avoiding me because she knew I disapproved – but then, one night, she turned up backstage at a gig I was playing in Reggio Calabria out of her mind, really high. While I was playing, she sat at the side of the stage in floods of tears. She never stopped crying throughout the entire show. Either she really hated my performance or she was asking for help.

  So we decided to stage an intervention. David and her publicist Jason Weisenfeld arranged it, at Allegra’s eighteenth birthday party in Gianni’s old apartment on Via Gesù. I was there, with David and Jason and our friends Ingrid Sischy and her partner Sandy, all waiting in this little sitting room. Donatella and Allegra came in, wearing these unbelievably extravagant, gorgeous Atelier Versace gowns, and sat on a divan as everyone spoke in turn. There was an awful silence. You never know how an intervention is going to go: if the person it’s aimed at isn’t ready to admit they’ve got a problem, it just turns into a disaster. Suddenly, Donatella spoke up. ‘My life is like your candle in the wind!’ she cried dramatically. ‘I want to die!’

  We got her on the phone to a rehab facility called The Meadows in Scottsdale, Arizona. We could only hear her side of the conversation, which was extraordinary. ‘Yes, yes … cocaine … also pills … oh, a handful of this pill, a handful of that pill, and if that doesn’t work I take all the pills and mix them together … yes … OK, I come now, but one condition: NO OILY FOOD.’

  Having presumably been assured that oily food wasn’t on the menu, off she went, still in her gown. The next day, we got a phone call from Jason Weisenfeld, who told us she had been admitted. Apparently the facility’s rule that residential patients weren’t allowed to wear make-up had gone down pretty badly, and there had been a bit of fuss when Donatella realized she’d forgotten to pack a deodorant but, other than that, she was fine: she went on to complete the programme and get clean. We congratulated Jason on pulling the whole thing off.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said glumly. ‘All I have to do now is walk around Scottsdale trying to find a fucking Chanel deodorant.’

  * * *

>   After the funeral, we invited Gianni’s partner Antonio to come and stay with us in Nice. He was distraught, and he never really got on with the rest of Gianni’s family. It was a very strange, sombre summer, sitting in the house we’d just bought, that we’d decorated in a style influenced by Gianni’s taste, that we’d been waiting to show off to him and get his opinion on. One night, David said very firmly that it was time I thought about hiring professional security. I’d never bothered before, not even after John was murdered. I had employed a guy called Jim Morris as a bodyguard in the seventies, but that was more a camp affectation than anything. He was a bodybuilder who’d been crowned Mr America, and openly gay – no small thing for a black tough guy to be in those days – and he spent more time carrying me onstage on his shoulders than anything else. Now it seemed we genuinely needed security. Things had changed.

  And our summer was about to get stranger still. One Sunday morning, at the end of August, we were woken by the sound of the fax machine going off. David went to look at it and came back with a sheet of paper, with a handwritten message from a friend in London: ‘so sorry to hear about this awful news’. Neither of us knew what it meant. It couldn’t possibly be referring to Gianni – he had been dead for six weeks now. With a mounting sense of dread, I switched the television on. And that was how I found out Princess Diana had died.

  fourteen

  I first met Diana in 1981, just before she and Prince Charles were married. It was at Prince Andrew’s twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle; Ray Cooper and I were supposed to be providing the entertainment. It was a completely surreal evening. The outside of the castle was illuminated with psychedelic lighting, and before we performed, the entertainment in the ballroom came courtesy of a mobile disco. Because the Queen was there, and no one wanted to cause any offence to the royal sensibilities, the disco was turned down about as low as you could get without switching it off altogether. You could literally hear your feet moving around on the floor over the music. Princess Anne asked me to dance with her to ‘Hound Dog’ by Elvis Presley. Well, I say dance: I ended up just awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot, trying to make as little noise as I could so that I didn’t drown out the music. If you strained your ears and concentrated hard, you could just about make out that the DJ had segued from Elvis into ‘Rock Around The Clock’. Then the Queen appeared, carrying her handbag. She walked over to us and asked if she could join us. So now I was trying to dance as inaudibly as possible with Princess Anne and the Queen – still holding her handbag – while what appeared to be the world’s quietest disco played Bill Haley. Weirdly, it made me think of The Band barging into my dressing room or Brian Wilson endlessly singing the chorus of ‘Your Song’ at me when I first went to America. It was eleven years later, my life had changed beyond recognition, and yet here I was, still desperately trying to act normal, while the world around me appeared to have gone completely mad.