ELTON’S CHRI
ELTON JOHN knows how to make us sob. He did it once in 1997, at the funeral of Princess Diana, when he sat at a piano in London’s Westminster Abbey and performed Candle In The Wind — written as a tribute to a Hollywood star, now suddenly a eulogy to England’s Rose.
It shouldn’t have worked, but we wept unashamedly. Two decades later, the old wizard has worked the same magic, with a John Lewis Christmas television advert set to his beautiful ballad Your Song. It traces his career from stadium superstardom right back to his first piano. The ad is an imaginative and heartfelt tribute, but it conceals the much darker truth of Elton John’s lonely childhood — one in which he feuded bitterly with both parents.
John Lewis’s festive ads, of course, have become an institution in themselves to such an extent that they’re even watched online in Ireland — despite the fact that we don’t have any stores (although Arnotts do stock a limited range). Over two minutes and 20 seconds, we realise that the old upright piano that Sir Elton still plays, as a 71-year-old rock god, is the very one he was given by his family one Christmas morning in the Forties. In the final scenes, his mother and grandmother look on, beaming with excitement, as toddler Elton (actually named Reg Dwight) tears off the wrapping paper to reveal the instrument that would inspire a lifetime of hits. The strings swell and an unseen audience roars, as the tagline says: ‘Some gifts are more than just a gift.’
The film is seamlessly done, mixing archive footage with scenes shot using five actors to portray the musician throughout his life.
When the moment comes for his first school concert and little Reg, a serious-faced boy with a neat parting and health service spectacles, searches the audience for his family’s faces . . . well, you cannot watch without feeling a lump rise up in your throat. And, though the picture it paints is far from the whole truth, this isn’t a dishonest advert.
Elton’s musical career really did begin with a piano in the front parlour of his grandparents’ council house, where he lived with his mum Sheila and nan Ivy, while his father was abroad — posted to Iraq with the RAF.
It was common for ordinary working-class households, in that pre-television era, to have an upright piano. As Elton would one day recall to a Hollywood audience, it was Ivy who first encouraged him to play, picking him up and depositing him on the piano stool with cheery words of encouragement when he was no more than three.
He took to it instantly and would bang away at the keys while his mother did the housework. One day, so the family legend goes, he astonished her by suddenly starting to pick out the melody of The Skaters’ Waltz. Even as a toddler, Reggie Dwight could hear a piece of music once and replicate it note for note.
BUT he never had a piano for Christmas. That would simply be too good to be true. In fact, his big present for his third Christmas in 1949 was picked out specially by his father, Stanley, who had just been sent overseas.
Stanley was miserable at the thought of being apart from his family and especially his only child at Christmas. He arranged with Hamleys, the West End toyshop, to deliver an expensive pedal car — an extravagant gift on a young officer’s salary.
You might imagine that, as a boy, he was grateful to his doting dad. Not a bit of it. In fact, he was bitterly resentful of his father’s absence and later accused Stanley of abandoning the family. The reality of Elton’s childhood is sad and poignant — but not in quite the way a John Lewis ad executive would wish.
Reginald Kenneth Dwight, who would one day change his name to Elton Hercules John, was born in March 1947 at the council house rented by Ivy and her husband Fred, a groundsman at a tennis club.
As an adult, Elton would claim that Stanley was absent on a tour of duty when Sheila went into labour: ‘I was two years old when he came home. Mother said: “Do you want to see [your son]?” He said: “No, I’ll wait till morning.” He’d been in Aden or somewhere and he came home after two years, after not seeing me born or anything.’
The rage was real, but the facts were not. Stanley was actually in the house when Sheila gave birth and, for the next 18 months, he commuted from home to his posting in Ruislip. When Stanley went away in 1949, his wife and son could have joined him, but it was Sheila who opted to stay in Pinner Hill Road. It was well-known in the family that she had hoped for her baby to be a girl.
Early photographs of Reggie show an infant of radiant beauty, with massed golden curls that Shirley Temple might have envied. Sheila was a devoted and fastidious mother. The baby possessed innumerable changes of outfit — a trait one day echoed in his stage shows.
His musical ability flourished and, to his family, he became a live-in entertainer. A snapshot sums up his early childhood. A plump, small boy with a round pug face sits at an upright piano, hands poised on white notes, looking over his left shoulder.
Even at seven or eight, his chubbycheeked smile has the resigned quality of a pro who must perform,. There is an implicit air of celebrity. At the wedding of his grown-up cousin Roy in 1954, where his father Stan was best man, the band failed to turn up — so young Reggie was ordered to the piano ‘in his little white tail suit and bow tie,’ remembered Roy. ‘He kept things going.’ By then, Stanley had been promoted to Squadron leader and he and Sheila were living at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. But life as a service wife did not suit Sheila. She felt the other wives were snobbish. As the marriage crumbled, it seemed to Reggie that his father became colder. In later years, Elton described the strict code of behaviour and table manners in their house, the rules about not making a noise or kicking a football in the garden in case it damaged the roses. Most of all, he described his dread of Stanley’s homecomings, when he’d be afraid of eating celery at the table in case the crunching enraged his father.
One story he often told was that his father refused to let him buy trendy Hush Puppies as a teenager. In revenge, when he became a glam rock star, Elton wore the most outrageous platform soles.
Stanley was to bear these accusations mostly in silence, but privately, he admitted they hurt deeply.
He’d been a disciplinarian, he agreed, but only to counteract the otherwise wholly feminine influence on the boy. On his postings abroad, he kept a photo of his wife and son by his bed and wrote home almost every day.
Indeed, by the time Reggie was 11, it was the father who had been rejected by his wife and child. Stanley spent three months in hospital, suffering paralysis following an electric shock, in 1958. Sheila and their son never visited.
Whether or not under his father’s influence, Reggie had become a boy of almost painful self-restraint — careful, neat, methodical and anxiously polite.
His nature was considerate, punctilious about writing thankyou letters at Christmas and birthdays and buying gifts for his mother and family.
His only fault was a tendency to temper tantrums, usually arising from stress and the fatigue of piano practice. These would blow up in a moment and disappear quickly.
AS HE fell in love with rock’n’roll, he would spend hours tending his record collection. Each single, LP and EP had its own protective, paper cover and was meticulously catalogued. This only child who grew up to be a stupendous buyer and hoarder of possessions said: ‘I grew up with inanimate objects as my friends.’
In 1960, Sheila and Stanley divorced. Reggie never forgave his father and, a quarter of a century later — in an interview — accused him of keeping all the proceeds from their house, while refusing to pay anything towards legal costs.
A sad and aggrieved Stanley would later point out the opposite had been true: he paid all the costs and gave Sheila half the proceeds from the sale, plus the car.
He also opened an account for his son at a West End clothing store and bought him a pair of the trendy Hush Puppies he craved.
Setting the seal on Reggie’s sense of betrayal, his father married again and had four children.
To the adult Elton, this was somehow proof he had never been wanted.
To the end of his days, Stanley insisted he had always loved his first son and supported his career.
There is one piece of proof to support his claims: a receipt from Hodges and Johnson’s music store of Romford, Essex, dated February 26, 1963, shortly before Reggie’s 16th birthday.
It is for ‘a secondhand upright pianoforte by Collingwood, walnut finish’ — price £68 (about €1,575 today).
It seems Elton John really did receive a piano as a gift when he was growing up . . . but what he doesn’t want to remember is that it was the father he grew to despise who bought it for him.