Me Elton John

by Elton John

  There is a popular theory among psychologists that a person cursed with an addictive personality can get addicted to virtually anything. It was a theory I spent a lot of the early noughties attempting to prove with the aid of a paper shredder we’d bought for the office at Woodside. I’m not sure how my obsession with it began. Partly it was founded on a need for security: we had, after all, had our bank statements plastered all over the front pages of the press because some idiot in John Reid’s office had thrown them out intact. But mostly it was because there’s something incredibly, indefinably satisfying about using a paper shredder: the sound it makes, the sight of the paper slowly vanishing into it, the tendrils of shredded paper emerging from the other end. I loved it. I could sit in a room filled with priceless works of art and find none of them as compelling as the sight of an old tour itinerary being decimated.

  But if I don’t know where my obsession began, I can tell you exactly when it ended. It was about two minutes after I saw the state of the room in which David was working on the seating plan – there were sheets of paper all over the place – and decided that here was a great opportunity both to help him out by tidying up a bit and to feed my burgeoning passion for turning old documents into confetti. I can’t remember how many pages of David’s meticulously arranged seating plan I managed to feed through the shredder before he wandered back into the room and started shouting. I’d never heard him shout like that in my life: David was never a man for volcanic explosions of temper, but it appeared that over the course of our twelve years together, he’d been quietly taking notes from a master of the art and waiting for the right moment to put what he’d learned into action. He began wildly depicting scenes of unmanageable social disaster, in which the BelAmi stars ended up discussing their work on Boys Like It Big 2 with his mum or my auntie Win. He was shouting so loudly you could hear him all over the house. You could certainly hear him very clearly upstairs in our bedroom. I know this for a fact because that’s where I decided to hide, carefully locking the door behind me as a precaution. I didn’t really think he was going to smash the paper shredder over my head, but all the same, the noise coming from downstairs suggested it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility.

  But everything else in the run-up to the ceremony went remarkably smoothly. Our friend Patrick Cox threw us an incredible joint stag party at a Soho gay club called Too 2 Much. It was hilarious, a full cabaret performance. Paul O’Grady hosted the whole thing and sang a duet with Janet Street-Porter. Sir Ian McKellen came dressed as Widow Twankey. Bryan Adams sang and Sam Taylor-Wood did a version of ‘Love To Love You Baby’. There were video messages from Elizabeth Taylor and Bill Clinton in between performances by the famous New York drag act Kiki and Herb and Eric McCormack, who played Will in Will and Grace, and was an old schoolfriend of David’s back in Ontario. Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters got so overexcited he ended up taking all his clothes off and demonstrating the pole-dancing skills he’d learned working in New York strip clubs before the band became successful. It was quite a night.

  On the morning of the ceremony we woke up to a beautiful winter’s day, sunny and crisp. There was a sort of magical Christmas Morning atmosphere in the house, amid all the bustle. We had guests staying with us: David’s family had arrived from Canada; my old schoolfriend Keith Francis had flown all the way from Australia with his wife. Outside, there were people putting finishing touches to the marquees and checking the fairy lights in the trees. The night before, we had watched the TV news about the first civil partnerships to take place in Northern Ireland – there was a shorter registration period there – and how the couples had faced protests outside their ceremonies, evangelical Christians bellowing at them about ‘sodomite propaganda’, people throwing flour bombs and eggs. I was genuinely worried – if that was what was happening to everyday people, what kind of reception would a really famous gay couple get? David assured me everything would be OK: the police were fully aware of the threat and had set up an area for protesters, where they couldn’t ruin the day. But now, the news from Windsor was that there were crowds lining the streets and a party atmosphere. No one wanted to attack us: instead, people had turned up with banners and cakes and presents for us. There were news trucks from CNN and the BBC parked outside, reporters doing pieces to camera.

  I turned the TV off and told David not to watch anything either. I just wanted us to stay in the moment, together, without any distractions. I’d been married before, of course, but this was different. I was truly being myself, being allowed to express my love for another man in a way that would have seemed beyond comprehension when I realized I was gay, or when I first came out in Rolling Stone – partly because no one ever talked about gay marriage or civil partnerships in 1976, and partly because, back then, I seemed no more capable of ending up in a long-term relationship than I did of flying to Mars. And yet here we were. It felt intense: not just personal, but historic, too, like we were part of the world changing for the better. I was as happy as I could ever remember being.

  And that was the moment my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath.

  * * *

  The first sign that there was something wrong was when she wouldn’t get out of the car. She and Derf had arrived at Woodside as planned, but then point-blank refused to come into the house. Despite various entreaties to join us, they just sat there, stony-faced. David’s family had to troop out to say hello through the car window. What the fuck was the matter with her? I didn’t get a chance to ask. The security arrangements for the ceremony were that everyone was supposed to be travelling together to the Guildhall in a convoy of cars. But Mum announced that she wouldn’t be joining the convoy, and nor would she be coming to the private lunch we were having at Woodside after the civil partnership, and suddenly drove off.

  Oh, great. The most important day of my life and one of Mum’s moods appeared to be upon us, the ones I’d lived in terror of when I was young. I’d inherited some of her capacity to sulk myself. The difference was that I snapped out of it quickly: I would realize what I was doing – shit, I’m not just behaving like an idiot, I’m behaving like my mother – and rush around issuing desperate apologies to everyone concerned. Mum never snapped out of it, never seemed contrite, never appeared to think she was in the wrong or behaving badly. The best you could hope for was a terrible argument – in which, as ever, she had to have the last word – followed by an awkward smoothing over, a shaky truce that lasted until she went off again. As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic, awesome level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy of taking a huff. I’m exaggerating only slightly. We’re talking about a woman who didn’t speak to her own sister for ten years as a result of an argument over whether Auntie Win had put skimmed milk in her tea or not. A woman whose dedication to sulking was such that, at its height, it literally caused her to pack her entire life up and leave the country. It happened in the eighties; she fell out with me and one of Derf’s sons from his first marriage at the same time and, as a result, emigrated to Menorca. She would rather move to a foreign country than back down or apologize. There’s not an enormous amount of point in trying to reason with someone like that.

  I watched her car disappear down the drive and found myself wishing she was in Menorca now. Or on the moon. Anywhere but heading to my civil partnership ceremony, which I had a terrible feeling she was going to try her best to stink up. I hadn’t wanted her there in the first place. I had a nagging fear that she was going to do something like this, just as I had when I got married to Renate. That was one of the reasons I’d insisted on getting married so quickly, in Australia – I hadn’t wanted Mum there. But I had changed my mind a few weeks beforehand, reasoning that not even Mum was crazy enough to pull a stunt like this. It appeared I was wrong.

  She didn’t – couldn’t – spoil the day. It was too magical, with the crowds outside the Guildhall cheering, and later, the cars arriving at Woodside and what seemed like ev
eryone I knew and loved climbing out to join the party, like your life flashing before your eyes in the loveliest of circumstances: Graham Taylor and Muff and Zena Winwood, Ringo Starr and George Martin, Tony King and Billie Jean King. But, in fairness to Mum, she absolutely gave it her best shot. When David and I exchanged our vows, she started talking, very loudly, over the top of us: rattling on about how she didn’t like the venue and how she couldn’t imagine getting married in a place like this. When the time came for the witnesses to sign the civil partnership licence, she signed her name, snapped, ‘It’s done, then,’ slammed the pen down and stormed off. It was bizarre; my mood kept switching from complete euphoria to wild panic at what she was going to do next. Worse, I couldn’t do anything about it. I knew from experience that trying to talk to her would just be lighting the blue touchpaper on a huge row that would ruin everything, and, better still, could quite easily take place in front of the world’s media or six hundred guests. I wasn’t keen on the coverage of Britain’s most high-profile civil partnership featuring a section where Elton John and his mother entertained the nation by screaming at each other on the steps of the Windsor Guildhall.

  At the party in the evening, she tutted and groaned and rolled her eyes during the speeches. She complained about the seating arrangements: apparently she wasn’t close enough to me and David – ‘you might as well have stuck me in Siberia’ – although it was hard to see how she could have been any closer without actually sitting in our laps. I avoided her as the evening wore on, which was easy – there were so many friends to speak to, who wanted to wish us well. But out of the corner of my eye I could see a steady stream of people going to speak to her, then coming away very quickly, wearing extremely long faces. She was vile to everyone, no matter how innocuous their attempts at conversation. Jay Jopling made the fatal mistake of saying to her, ‘Isn’t this a lovely day?’ which apparently counted as merciless provocation. ‘I’m glad you fucking well think so,’ snapped Mum in response. Tony King went to say hello – he’d known Mum and Derf for years – and, for his trouble, was informed that he was looking old. At one point, Sharon Osbourne sidled up to me as I was looking on.

  ‘I know she’s your mother,’ she muttered, ‘but I want to kill her.’

  I didn’t find out what had provoked all this until much later. She told the press she was upset because she’d been told she wasn’t allowed in any of the photographs because she wasn’t wearing a hat, which was just nonsense. David’s mum had wanted a hat for the ceremony, he’d offered to take her and my mum shopping, but my mum had said she didn’t want one. Fairly obviously this wasn’t a problem at all, given that she was in all the family photographs. It turned out that David’s parents knew what the problem was with her all along, but they didn’t tell us before the ceremony, because they didn’t want to upset us. They had rung her as soon as they arrived in the UK, having always got on well with Mum and Derf. They’d even gone on holidays together. My mother had told them they all had to work together to stop the civil partnership going ahead. She didn’t approve of two men ‘getting married’, as she put it. She thought it was wrong that gay couples should be treated in the same way as straight couples. Everyone she had spoken to was horrified by the very idea. It was going to hurt my career. David’s mum told her she was nuts, that their kids were doing something amazing and she should support them. My mother put the phone down on her.

  She repeated the same line to me a couple of years later, in the middle of a blazing row. It didn’t make sense. Mum had always been incredibly hard work, but she had never been homophobic. She was supportive when I told her I was gay and she had been unflappable when the press cornered her after I came out in Rolling Stone, telling them she thought I was brave and she didn’t care if I was gay or straight. Why would she suddenly decide she had a problem with my sexuality thirty years later? Maybe she had all along, and had somehow managed to suppress it until now. As ever, I think the real problem was that she hated anyone being closer to me than she was. She’d been cold towards most of my boyfriends, and cold towards Renate, but this was on a different level. She knew the boyfriends were never going to turn into a long-term relationship: I was too erratic, because of all the coke I was taking. Even though I married Renate, Mum believed deep down it wasn’t going to last, because she knew I was gay. But now I was sober and settled with a man I was deeply in love with. I’d found a life partner, and the civil partnership underlined that. She couldn’t cope with the thought of the umbilical cord finally being cut: that idea had become so all-consuming that she couldn’t see past it, didn’t care about anything else, including the fact that I was finally happy.

  Well, that was her tough luck. I was finally happy, and I wasn’t going to change that for anybody, no matter how many moods they took. When she realized that, perhaps she would come round.

  * * *

  I had plenty to be happy about. Not just in my personal life: between the Vegas shows, Billy Elliot and the new albums, I was enjoying making music so much that my enthusiasm became infectious. David started getting interested in the stuff that had inspired me at the start of my career, artists and albums that he was a little too young to have experienced first-hand. He would make up iPod playlists of things I recommended to him. He took them with him to play in our hotel room when we went on holiday to South Africa, with our friends Ingrid and Sandy.

  If you want an example of how a deep, lifelong friendship can be forged from the most unpromising start, Ingrid and I were it. I’d first met her when she was writing a profile about me for Interview magazine, which she edited. Or rather, I’d gone out of my way to avoid meeting her when she was writing a profile about me: I was in a foul mood and cancelled our interview. She rang back and told me she was coming anyway. I told her not to bother. She told me she was coming anyway. I told her to fuck off. She put the phone down and materialized at my hotel room door in what seemed like a matter of minutes. A matter of minutes later, I had fallen in love with her. Ingrid had balls. Ingrid had opinions. And Ingrid’s opinions were worth listening to, because Ingrid was clearly as smart as hell. She’d been made the editor of Artforum magazine when she was twenty-seven and seemed to know everything there was to know about – and everyone there was to know in – the worlds of art and fashion. She took no shit from anybody, including, it had now become apparent, me. She was incredibly funny. By the end of the afternoon, she not only had her interview, she had a commitment from me to write a column for her magazine, and I had the same feeling I had when I met Gianni Versace for the first time: if he had seemed like my long-lost brother, Ingrid was my missing sister. We rang each other all the time; I loved talking to her, partly because she was a fabulous gossip, partly because whenever you spoke to her you learned something, but mostly because she always told you the truth, even if the truth wasn’t what you wanted to hear.

  Ingrid was originally from South Africa but had left when she was a kid. Her mother was in danger of being arrested for her involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, so the family moved first to Edinburgh then New York. But Ingrid loved South Africa, which is how she and Sandy ended up accompanying us on the holiday. One evening we were getting ready for dinner, with one of David’s early seventies iPod playlists providing the soundtrack. While he was in the shower, ‘Back To The Island’ by Leon Russell came on. It caught me completely off guard. It’s a beautiful song, but it’s incredibly sad: about loss and regret and time passing. I sat on the bed and I started to cry. Leon coming into the dressing room at the Troubadour, the tours I did opening for him, and Eric Clapton, and Poco: it all suddenly seemed a very long time ago. I’d played this song over and over when I lived on Tower Grove Drive. I could still see it in my mind’s eye. The dark wood of the interior; the suede on the master bedroom’s walls; the way the sunlight fell on the swimming pool in the morning. A crowd of people stumbling through the front door after the Whiskey or the Rainbow or Le Restaurant finally threw us out; the clouds of heady Californian grass
and the glasses filled with bourbon, and the blue eyes of a guy I lured up to the games room, who said he was straight but whose smile suggested he was persuadable. Dusty Springfield arriving back after a night touring the city’s gay clubs and falling out of the car onto the drive. The afternoon Tony King and I tried mescaline and ended up with the screaming horrors, after someone in our party raided the kitchen and decided, in their altered state, that they’d invent a new kind of Bloody Mary, with a lump of raw liver on the side of the glass. Just the sight of it set us off.

  But my memories of LA in the seventies were filled with ghosts. All the old Hollywood legends I’d gone out of my way to meet there had died of old age. So had Ray Charles. I’d been the last person to record a song with him, for an album of duets, thirty-four years after he’d invited me to appear on American television for the first time. We sang ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’, sitting down – he was too weak to stand. I asked the engineers for a copy of the tape, not so much for the music, but just to have a record of us chatting between takes. I suppose I wanted proof that it had really happened, that a kid who’d dreamed of being Ray Charles actually ended up talking to him like a friend. But there were other ghosts, too, people who didn’t die of old age: people who AIDS took young, people who’d drunk or drugged themselves to death. People who’d died in accidents, people who’d been killed, people who’d died of the things that kill you in your fifties and sixties if you’re unlucky. Dee Murray, my old bass player. Doug Weston, who ran the Troubadour. Bill Graham. Gus Dudgeon. John Lennon, George Harrison and Harry Nilsson. Keith Moon and Dusty Springfield. Endless boys I’d fallen in love with, or thought I’d fallen in love with, on the dance floor at the After Dark.