Me Elton John

by Elton John

  I was pleased he was getting treatment. I felt bad that I hadn’t noticed things had got as out of hand as they had: once I did, I just wanted David to get better. But I was also weirdly nervous. The world doesn’t have a bigger advocate for getting sober than me, but I also know that it’s a huge undertaking: it can change people completely. What if the man I loved came home a different person? What if our relationship changed – the way my relationship with Hugh had changed when we got sober – and became unworkable? It was enough to keep me up at night, but when David came back, he didn’t seem that different, although he had more energy and more focus, and he was dedicated to working on his recovery in a way that affected me. I started going to AA meetings again. I hadn’t been since the early nineties and I only went to keep David company and show support, but when I got in there, I found I really enjoyed it. You always hear something inspiring; you always come out with your spirits lifted. We started hosting a meeting at home, every Sunday, inviting friends who are also in recovery, like Tony King. I suppose it’s a little like going to church – just being thankful for your sobriety. I always come out bouncing.

  David seemed to be bouncing, too. Not long after he got sober, I parted company with Frank Presland, who’d gone from being my lawyer to my manager. I’d had a succession of different managers since John Reid, but none of them had really worked out. I thought about different options, then found myself wondering if David couldn’t do it. Before we had met, he was a hot-shot advertising executive. He oversaw huge campaigns, worked with budgets – the skills you needed to do that didn’t seem so different to the skills you needed in rock management. There were obviously reservations about having a business relationship with your partner, but I liked the idea of us working together: we had kids, it would be like a family business. David was nervous about taking the role on, but eventually he agreed.

  He really ran at the task: never underestimate the zeal of the newly sober. He streamlined the company and made financial savings. He started changing things to suit the way the music business was changing: taking streaming into account, and social media. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. I’ve never owned a mobile phone. As you might expect, given my collector’s mentality, I’m not really interested in streaming music: I like to own albums, lots of them, preferably on vinyl. And, having taken into account both my temper and my impressive track record of expressing what you might call robust and forthright opinions, I realized that my going anywhere near something like Twitter was likely to end in complete bedlam, at best.

  But David worked it all out. He built up a great team. He seemed genuinely interested in areas of the music industry that I couldn’t have been more bored by. He started really pushing to get a biopic made of my life. The idea had started years before, with the films David LaChapelle made for The Red Piano shows in Vegas: if a film was going to be made about me, I wanted it to look like them. They were gritty, but they were fantastical and surreal and over-the-top, and my career’s been fantastical and surreal and over-the-top, so they fitted perfectly. We got Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, to write the screenplay, which I loved, but it took years and years to get it off the ground. Directors and lead actors came and went. David LaChapelle was supposed to direct it initially, but he wanted to concentrate on his fine art career. Tom Hardy was going to play me, but he couldn’t sing, and I really wanted whoever was going to be me to perform the songs, rather than lip-synch them. There was a lot of wrangling with studios over budgets and over the content of the film. People kept asking us to tone the gay sex and drugs down so it would get a PG-13 rating, but, you know, I’m a gay man and a recovering addict: there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point in making a sanitized film about me that leaves out the sex and the coke. There was a time when I didn’t think it was going to happen, but David kept plugging away, and eventually it did.

  And he had some radical new ideas. I discovered just how radical one morning in LA, when he presented me with a sheet of paper. He had written down a load of dates relating to Zachary and Elijah’s school life – when each term would start, how long the holidays were, the years they would be moving up from infants to juniors and then secondary school, when they would be sitting exams.

  ‘How much of this do you want to be around for?’ he asked. ‘You can work your tour schedules around it.’

  I looked at the sheet of paper. It effectively mapped out their lives. By the time they reached the final dates on it, they wouldn’t be children anymore, they would be teenagers, young men. And I would be in my eighties.

  ‘All of it,’ I said finally. ‘I want to be there for all of it.’

  David raised his eyebrows. ‘In which case,’ he said, ‘you need to think about changing your life. You need to think about retiring from touring.’

  It was a huge decision. I’ve always thought of myself as a working musician, just as I was when Bluesology were going up and down the motorway in the van that Arnold Tendler had forked out for on our behalf. That’s not false modesty. Fairly obviously, I’m not exactly the same as I was in the sixties – I can assure you it’s a very long time indeed since I arrived at a gig in the back of a transit van – but the underlying philosophy, if you like, has never changed. Back then, if you got a gig, you went and played it: that’s ultimately how you earned your living; that’s how you defined yourself as a musician. I prided myself on the fact that my schedule now wasn’t that different from my schedule in the early seventies. Bigger venues, obviously, more luxurious accommodation and travel arrangements, and less time spent locking myself in the lavatory backstage to avoid the attentions of female groupies. Even the most ardent among them had long ago got the memo regarding the improbability of Elton John being swayed by their charms. But I played roughly the same number of gigs: 120 or 130 a year. However many shows I did, I wanted to do more the following year. I kept a list of countries I still wanted to play – places I hadn’t visited yet; countries like Egypt, where I’d thus far been banned from performing because I was gay. I was fond of saying I would be happy to die onstage.

  But David’s list of school dates had thrown me. My kids were only going to grow up once. I didn’t want to be in Madison Square Garden, or the Los Angeles Staples Center, or the Taco Bell Arena, Boise, while it happened, much as I loved the fans who came to see me there. I didn’t want to be anywhere other than with Zachary and Elijah. I’d finally found something that matched the lure of the stage. We started making plans for a farewell tour. It had to be bigger and more spectacular than anything I had done before, a big celebration, a thank-you to the people who’d bought albums and tickets over the years.

  The plans for the farewell tour were already underway when I found out I had cancer. They discovered it during a routine check-up. My doctor noticed that the level of prostate-specific antigens in my blood had gone up slightly, and sent me to an oncologist for a biopsy. It came back positive. It was strange: I wasn’t as shocked at hearing the word ‘cancer’ as I had been back in the eighties, when they thought I had it in my throat. I think it was because it was prostate cancer. It’s no joke, but it’s incredibly common, they had caught it very early, and besides, I’m blessed with the kind of constitution that just makes me bounce back from illnesses. I’d had a couple of serious health scares before, and they didn’t really slow me down. In the nineties, I was taken ill en route to David and Victoria Beckham’s wedding. I felt faint that morning when I was playing tennis, and passed out in the car on the way to the airport. I missed the wedding, went to the hospital, they monitored my heart and told me that I had an inner-ear infection. The next day, I was playing tennis again, when David came thundering down from the house yelling that I had to stop immediately. My feelings about being interrupted while I’m playing tennis are a matter of public record – you may recall the incident in Tantrums and Tiaras where I announced I was leaving France immediately and never coming back, because a fan had waved at me and shouted ‘yoo-hoo!’ while I was trying to serve. I ha
d just begun telling David to fuck off in no uncertain terms, when he shouted that the hospital had called; they had made a mistake – I had a heart irregularity and I had to fly to London immediately to get a pacemaker fitted. I was only in the hospital for one night and, rather than feeling debilitated, I thought the pacemaker was fantastic. It seemed to give me more energy than before.

  More recently, I’d managed to play nine gigs, take twenty-four flights and perform with Coldplay at a fundraising ball for the AIDS Foundation with a burst appendix: the doctors told me I had a colon infection and I felt exhausted, but I just kept going. I could have died – normally when your appendix bursts it causes peritonitis, which kills you within a few days. I had my appendix out, spent a couple of days in hospital on morphine, hallucinating – I’m not going to lie, I quite enjoyed that part – and a few weeks in Nice recuperating, then went back on the road. It’s just how I am. If I hadn’t got the constitution I have, all the drugs I took would have killed me decades ago.

  The oncologist told me I had two options. One was surgery to remove my prostate. The other was a course of radiation and chemotherapy that meant I would have to keep going back to hospital dozens of times. I went straight for the surgery. A lot of men won’t have it, because it’s a major operation, you can’t have sex for at least a year afterwards and you can’t control your bladder for a while, but effectively my kids made the decision for me. I didn’t like the idea of cancer hanging over me – us – for years to come: I just wanted rid of it.

  I had the surgery done in Los Angeles, quickly and quietly. We made sure that news of my illness didn’t reach the press: the last thing I wanted was a load of hysterical stories in the papers and photographers outside my house. The operation was a complete success. They discovered that the cancer had spread to two lobes in my prostate; targeted radiotherapy wouldn’t have caught that. I had made the right decision. I was back onstage at Caesar’s Palace within ten days.

  It wasn’t until I arrived in Las Vegas that I noticed something wasn’t right. I woke in the morning feeling a little uncomfortable. As the day progressed, the pain got worse and worse. By the time I was backstage at the gig, it was indescribable. I was in tears. The band suggested we should cancel the show, but I said no. Before you start marvelling at my bravery and nonpareil professionalism, I should point out that I didn’t agree to play out of any show-must-go-on stoicism or sense of duty. Weirdly, getting onstage seemed preferable to sitting at home with nothing to do in exactly the same pain. So we went on. It sort of worked. At least the gig gave me something else to think about other than how ill I felt, not least at the aforementioned moment when I realized that the radical prostatectomy’s after-effects on my bladder were making themselves known.

  That was pretty funny – if only the audience knew – but nevertheless, if pissing yourself in front of 4,000 people constitutes the highlight of your day, you’re clearly in a bad way. It turned out that I was suffering a rare and unexpected complication from the operation: fluid was leaking from my lymph nodes. I had it drained at the hospital and the pain went away. The fluid built up again and the pain came back. Fabulous: another thrilling evening of agony and incontinence onstage at Caesar’s Palace. The cycle went on for two and a half months, before they cured it by accident: a routine colonoscopy shifted the fluid permanently, days before my seventieth birthday.

  My party was at the Red Studios in Hollywood. David brought Zachary and Elijah over from London as a surprise. Ryan Adams, Rosanne Cash and Lady Gaga performed. Prince Harry sent a video, wishing me all the best while wearing a pair of Elton John glasses. Stevie Wonder played for me, having either forgotten about, or forgiven me for refusing to come out of my bedroom the last time he’d tried to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, on board the Starship, forty-four years previously. And Bernie was there, with his wife and two young daughters in tow – it was a kind of dual celebration, because it was fifty years since we’d first met, in 1967. We posed for photographs together – me in a maroon suit with satin lapels, a shirt with a ruff and velvet slippers; Bernie dressed down in jeans, his hair cropped and his arms covered in tattoos. We were as much a study in opposites now as we had been the day Bernie first turned up in London from Owmby-by-Spital. Bernie had ended up back in the countryside, on a ranch in Santa Barbara: he’d half gone back to his roots and half turned into one of the Old West characters he loved to write about, like something off Tumbleweed Connection. He literally won competitions for roping cattle. I collected porcelain, and the Tate Modern was staging an exhibition drawn from the vast selection of twentieth-century photography I had amassed: one of the star exhibits was the original Man Ray photograph Bernie and I had bought a poster of when we were trying to decorate our shared bedroom in Frome Court. We were worlds apart. I don’t know how it all still worked between us, but then, I never understood how it worked in the first place. It just did. It just does.

  It was a magical evening. I can usually live without the kind of event that revolves around everyone telling me how wonderful I am – I’ve never been good at taking a compliment – but I was in a fantastic mood. I was cancer-free, and pain-free. The operation had been a success. The complications had been fixed. I was about to go back on tour, down to South America to play some shows with James Taylor. Everything was back to normal.

  Until I nearly died.

  * * *

  It was on the flight back from Santiago that I started feeling ill. We had to change planes in Lisbon, and by the time I got on board, I felt feverish. Then I felt freezing cold. I couldn’t stop shaking. I wrapped myself up in blankets and felt a little warmer, but something clearly wasn’t right. I got home to Woodside and called the doctor. My fever had subsided a bit, and he advised me to take some rest. The next morning I woke up feeling worse than I ever had in my life. I was taken to King Edward VII’s Hospital in London. They gave me a scan and noticed that something was terribly wrong. I was told that my condition was so serious, the hospital didn’t have the equipment to cope with it. I had to be moved to the London Clinic.

  I arrived at midday. My last memory is of hyperventilating while they were trying to find a vein to give me an injection. I have really muscular arms, so it’s always been difficult, compounded by the fact that I hate needles. Eventually they brought in a Russian nurse, who looked like she had just changed into her uniform after a morning’s training with the Olympic shot put team, and by two thirty I was on the operating table: there was more lymphatic fluid leaking, this time in my diaphragm, and it had to be drained. For two days afterwards, I was in intensive care. When I came round, they told me I had contracted a major infection in South America, and that they were treating it with massive doses of antibiotics, intravenously. Everything seemed to be fine, and then the fever came back. They took a sample of the infection and grew it in a Petri dish. It was much more serious than they had first realized; they had to change the antibiotics, up the dosage. I had MRI scans and God knows how many other procedures. I just lay there feeling terrible, being wheeled here and there, having tubes stuck in me and taken out again, not really taking in what was going on. The doctors told David I was twenty-four hours away from death. If the South American tour had gone on for another day, that would have been it: brown bread.

  I was incredibly lucky – I had a fantastic team around me and the best possible medical care – although, I have to say, I didn’t exactly think of myself as terribly lucky at the time. I couldn’t sleep. All I can really remember is lying in bed, awake all night, wondering if I was going to die. I didn’t know the details, didn’t know how close I really was to dying – David had very wisely kept that information to himself – but how ill I felt in itself was enough to get me thinking about mortality. This wasn’t how or when I wanted to go. I wanted to die at home, surrounded by my family, preferably having lived to an enormously advanced age first. I wanted to see the boys again. I needed more time.

  After eleven days I was allowed to leave. I couldn’t walk �
� there were shooting pains down my legs – and the sheer quantity and power of the antibiotics I had to take wiped me out completely, but at least I was home. I spent seven weeks recuperating, learning to walk again. I never left the house unless it was to see a doctor. It was the kind of forced leisure that would ordinarily have driven me up the wall – I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent this long at home – but, as ill as I felt, I found I really enjoyed it. It was springtime, and the gardens at Woodside looked beautiful. There were far, far worse places in the world to be trapped. I settled into a kind of domestic routine, pottering around the grounds and enjoying the garden during the day, waiting for the boys to come home from school and give me their news.

  In the hospital, alone at the dead of night, I’d prayed: please don’t let me die, please let me see my kids again, please give me a little longer. In a strange way, it felt like the time I spent recuperating was the answer to my prayers: if you want more time, you need to learn to live like this, you have to slow down. It was like being shown a different life, a life I realized I loved more than being on the road. Any lingering doubts I might have had about retiring from touring just evaporated. I knew I had made the right decision. Music was the most wonderful thing, but it still didn’t sound as good as Zachary chattering about what had happened at Cubs or football practice. I couldn’t carry on pretending I was twenty-two anymore. Pretending I was twenty-two was going to do what drugs and alcohol and cancer had failed to achieve, and kill me. And I wasn’t ready to die yet.

  epilogue

  The farewell tour kicked off on 8 September 2018 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. David had pulled together exactly the lavish celebration I wanted. There was an incredible set, and he had commissioned a series of amazing films to accompany the songs: animations that made the cover of Captain Fantastic come to life, old footage of me from every stage of my career and edgy films made by contemporary artists. Tony King was on hand to cast his eye over them, and ensure they all looked perfect: half a century after he first wafted into my life, looking extraordinary, I still trusted his aesthetic sense implicitly. The reviews were incredible – the last time I’d had notices like that, I had a full head of hair and the critic had to spend half the piece explaining who I was. The loveliest thing was the sense of affection about them, a real sadness that I’d decided to stop touring, that an era was drawing to a close.