Sexy John Legend’s path to success
He’s come a long way from geeky boy to being named sexiest man alive – we look at John Legend’s winding road to success
IF YOU’D told his 17-year-old self he’d one day be considered a sex symbol he would’ve laughed in your face.
Gangly and goofy, he was the ultimate nerd – and a supersmart one at that. He finished high school two years ahead of his peers and went to university when he was just 16. But cool he was not.
“Oh yes, I had an awkward phase,” John Legend recently admitted. “I was always less mature, less at ease socially.”
But just look at him now. The 40-yearold crooner is married to one of the sexiest women in showbiz, is a beloved judge on top talent-search show The Voice and has won almost every major music award going. And to top it all, readers of People recently voted him 2019’s sexiest man alive in the American magazine’s annual poll of the hottest hunks on the planet.
John takes the mantle from Idris Elba and marked the occasion with a pic and a post on social media.
“1995 John would be very perplexed to be following 2018 Idris Elba as sexiest man alive,” he wrote.
Earlier this year the All of Me singer jokingly predicted he might get the title.
“I feel like, if I’m on The Voice, I’m going to get it,” he said, referring to the fact that coaches Adam Levine and Blake Shelton were both named sexiest man alive – Adam in 2013 and Blake in 2017.
Some people were less than impressed with John’s win, with one troll saying she doubted he could “throw me over his shoulder or defend me better than I can”.
He lives an idyllic life now – happily married, fabulously successful and constantly in demand. But behind those smiling eyes lies a story of hardship and heartbreak that could’ve derailed geeky John’s early promise.
JOHN Stephens, as he was christened, was a precocious talent. The son of Phyllis, a seamstress, and Ronald, a factory worker from Springfield in Ohio, he learnt to play the piano when he was just three years old. His mom was his first and biggest fan. “Whenever we had opportunities to sing in church or in school, she’d suggest that I do it. She always encouraged me.”
Phyllis was also the choir director at the church where her father, Raymond Lloyd, was the pastor and her mother, Elmira, was the organist.
The Stephens family were deeply religious and Phyllis and Ronald decided to home-school John and his siblings.
John spent every spare second playing the piano. “Typically, you ask your son or daughter, ‘Have you practised your lessons?’ ” Ronald said. “But John was the kind of kid where I’d be like, ‘Hey man, get off that piano – you’re driving us crazy!’ ”
Almost as soon as he learnt to read and write, he was penning and singing his own songs. Then grandma Elmira died of a heart attack at age 58 and the family was left reeling.
“I was traumatised because we were so close. She was my music guru. She taught me a lot about music and a lot of my style was influenced by her,” John said.
Phyllis took it even harder, plunging into deep depression and then into drug addiction. She and Ronald divorced when John was 10 and she spent the better part of a decade living on the streets – when she wasn’t in jail.
John and his siblings lived with their dad, and years would go by without them seeing their mom. “She was a legitimate drug addict,” John said.
Yet he rose above the heartache and enrolled to study English at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with distinction.
But he didn’t just study at varsity: he
was also the director of an a cappella group and through a mutual friend he was introduced to Lauryn Hill. She hired him to play piano on Everything Is Everything for her debut solo album.
After graduating, he took a corporate job working as a management consultant in New York. “It was something to pay the bills,” he said. “Most artists have to wait tables or something like that. I actually had something that paid well.”
In the evening and at weekends he performed at nightclubs while trying to get signed by a record label. But he battled: his voice and style were cool, music bosses would tell him, yet he had no potential hits on his demo.
Kanye West disagreed. John had been his cousin’s roommate, and the then-upand-coming producer signed him to his label and persuaded John to use the stage name suggested by the poet J Ivy.
And a legend was born.
H‘My mother didn’t need punishment, she needed help’
IS debut album, Get Lifted, earned John three Grammys.
Soon he began using his platform to speak out against injustice. He formed Free America, a group advocating criminal justice reform, partly in response to what had happened to his mother during his childhood.
“My mother’s addiction didn’t just tear her life apart, it tore our family apart too. Drug addiction is a serious problem and society is right to want to tackle it.
“But we’ve been going about it wrong. My mother didn’t need punishment, she needed help,” he said.
His mom recovered from her addiction and remarried John’s father in 2000, although they divorced again in 2006.
John’s own love-life was the stuff of rumours. He was known as “either being in the closet or a modeliser [someone who habitually hangs out with models]”, his wife, Chrissy Teigen, recalls.
Chrissy, a model herself, met John in 2007 on the set of the music video for his song Stereo. They hit it off immediately.
“It got serious pretty quickly,” John says. “I didn’t know I wanted someone funny until I was with someone funny.”
They were married in 2013 and kids Luna (3) and Miles (1) followed.
“My mom spends a lot of time with the kids,” John says, adding it took him years to come to terms with his mother’s abandonment. “It hasn’t been an easy process, but it was worth it in the end.”
Chrissy is proud of her hubby’s sexiest man alive honour. “I’ve finally impressed my wife!” John says.
The couple’s children? Not so much. “The kids do not care,” Chrissy quips.