Elton John on life with the royals
Over the course of his long career Elton John has rubbed shoulders with a host of celebrities – but none as odd as Britain’s royal family. In this extract from his new memoir the pop star recalls a weird disco at Windsor Castle which saw him dancing with the queen and a dinner at his home where Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone nearly came to blows over Princess Diana
IFIRST met Diana in 1981, just before she and Prince Charles were married. It was at Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle – English percussionist 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.
That was the thing about my interactions with the royal family. I always found them incredibly charming and funny people. I know the queen’s public image isn’t exactly one of wild frivolity but I think that’s more to do with the nature of her job.
I noticed it when I got the CBE [Commander of the British Empire award from the queen in 1996] and then the knighthood two years later. She has to spend two-and-a-half hours handing the things out, making small talk with 200 people, one after the other. Anyone would be hard pressed to come up with a string of brilliant witticisms in that position. She just asks you if you’re busy at the moment, you say “yes, Ma’am”, she says “how lovely” and moves on.
But in private she could be hilarious. At another party, I saw her approach her nephew Viscount Linley and ask him to look in on his sister, who’d been taken ill and retired to her room. When he repeatedly tried to fob her off, the queen lightly slapped him across the face, saying “Don’t” – SLAP – “argue” – SLAP – “with” – SLAP – “me” – SLAP – “I” – SLAP – “am” – SLAP – “THE QUEEN!” That seemed to do the trick. As he left, she saw me staring at her, gave me a wink and walked off.
Yet no matter how funny or normal the royal family seemed, whether they were complaining about the paint job on my Aston Martin, or asking me if I’d done any coke before I went onstage, or winking at me after slapping their nephew across the face, there’d inevitably come a moment where I’d find myself feeling slightly out of place, thinking: “This is just bizarre. I’m a musician from a council house on Pinner Road – what am I doing here?”
But with Diana it wasn’t like that. Despite her status and background, she was blessed with an incredible social ease, an ability to talk to anybody, to make herself seem ordinary, to make people feel totally comfortable in her company.
Her kids have inherited it, Prince Harry in particular; he’s exactly the same as his mom, completely without any interest in formality or grandeur. That famous photo of her holding an Aids patient’s hand at the London Middlesex Hospital in 1987 – that was Diana.
I don’t think she was necessarily trying to make a big point, although obviously she did: in that moment, she changed public attitudes to Aids forever. She just met someone suffering, dying in agony: why wouldn’t you reach out and touch them? It’s the natural human impulse, to try and comfort someone.
THAT night in 1981 she arrived in the ballroom and we immediately clicked. We ended up pretending to dance the Charleston while hooting at the disco’s feebleness. She was fabulous company, the best dinner-party guest, incredibly indiscreet, a real gossip:
you could ask her anything and she’d tell you.
The only peculiar thing about her was the way she talked about Prince Charles. She never mentioned him by name; it was always “my husband”, never Charles, certainly never an affectionate nickname. It seemed very distant, cold and formal, which was very strange because the one thing Diana wasn’t was formal: she was always incredulous at how starchy and proper some other members of the royal family could be.
But if I was bowled over by Diana, it was nothing compared to the impact she could have on straight men. They seemed to completely lose their minds in her presence: they were just utterly bewitched.
When I was making The Lion King, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney, came over to England and we threw a dinner party for him and his wife, Marilyn, at Woodside [Elton’s home in Windsor]. I asked them if there was anyone in Britain they really wanted to meet and straight away they said “Princess Diana”.
So we invited her, and George Michael, British screenwriter and director Richard Curtis and his wife, Emma Freud, Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone, all of whom were in the country at the time.
The most peculiar scene developed. Straight away, Richard Gere and Diana seemed very taken with each other. She was separated from Prince Charles by this point, and Richard had just broken up with Cindy Crawford, and they ended up sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace together, locked in rapt conversation.
As the rest of us chatted, I couldn’t help notice a slightly strange atmosphere in the room. Judging by the kind of looks he kept shooting them, the sight of Diana and Richard’s newly blossoming friendship was not going down very well with Sylvester at all. I think he might have turned up to the party with the express intention of picking Diana up, only to find his plans for the evening unexpectedly ruined.
Eventually, dinner was served. We moved into the dining room and seated ourselves at the table. Or at least, most of us did. There was no sign of Richard, or indeed Sylvester. We waited. Still no sign. Finally, I asked David [Furnish, Elton’s future husband] to go and find them. He came back with both of them, but he was wearing a fairly ashen expression.
“Elton,” he mumbled. “We have . . . a situation.”
It transpired that when David had gone out to find them, he’d discovered Sylvester and Richard in the corridor, squaring up to each other, apparently about to settle their differences over Diana by having a fistfight. He’d managed to calm things down by pretending he hadn’t noticed what was going on – “Hey, guys! Time for dinner!” – but Sylvester clearly still wasn’t happy.
After dinner, Diana and Richard resumed their position together in front of the fire, and Sylvester eventually stormed off home.
“I never would have come,” he snapped, as David and I showed him to the door, “if I’d known Prince fuckin’ Charming was gonna be here.” Then he added: “If I’d wanted her, I would’ve taken her!”
We managed to wait until his car was out of sight before we started laughing.
Back in the living room, Diana and Richard were still gazing raptly at each other. She seemed completely unruffled. Maybe she hadn’t realised what was happening. Or maybe stuff like that happened all the time and she was used to it.
After she died, people started talking about something called the Diana Effect, meaning the way she managed to change the public’s attitudes to the royal family, or to Aids or bulimia or mental health.
But every time I heard the phrase, I thought about that night. There was definitely another kind of Diana Effect: one that could bring Hollywood superstars to the verge of a punch-up over her attentions at a dinner party, like a couple of lovestruck teenage idiots.
DIANA was a very dear friend for years, and then, completely unexpectedly, we fell out. The cause was a book fashion designer Gianni Versace put together called Rock and Royalty.
It was a collection of portraits by great photographers: Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Herb Ritts, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe. The proceeds were going to the Aids Foundation, and she agreed to write the
‘Straight away, Richard Gere and Diana seemed very taken with each other'
foreword.
Then she got cold feet. I think Buckingham Palace didn’t like the idea of a member of the royal family having anything to do with a book that featured shots of naked guys with towels draped around them.
So, at the last moment, Diana withdrew her foreword. She said she had no idea of the book’s contents, which just wasn’t true: Gianni had shown her the whole thing and she had said she loved it.
I wrote back to her, calling her out, telling her how much money she had cost the Aids Foundation, reminding her that she had seen the book. The letter I got back was very formal and severe: “Dear Mr John . . .” And that seemed to be the end of that.
I was angry with her but I was also worried. She seemed to be losing touch with all sorts of really close friends, who would be honest with her and tell her the truth. She was surrounding herself instead with people who told her what she wanted to hear, or who’d listen and nod when she came out with some of the more paranoid theories she’d developed about the royal family since her divorce.
I knew from personal experience that wasn’t a healthy situation. I didn’t speak to her again until the day Gianni was murdered.
She was the first person to call me after John Reid [Elton’s former boyfriend and business manager] rang and told me he was dead. I don’t even know how she got hold of the number; we hadn’t had the house in Nice for long.
She was just down the coast, in St Tropez, on Dodi Fayed’s yacht. She asked how I was, if I’d spoken to Gianni’s sister
Donatella. Then she said, “I’m so sorry. It was a silly falling-out. Let’s be friends.”
She came with us to the funeral, looking incredible: tanned from her holiday, wearing a pearl necklace. She was the same warm, caring person she’d always been.
When she walked in the paparazzi in the church went crazy: it was like the biggest star in the world had arrived, which I suppose she had. They didn’t let up throughout the service, although I feel I should point out that the famous shot they got of her supposedly consoling me – where she’s leaning forward towards me, speaking, while I’m red-eyed and glazed with grief – is one moment where she wasn’t doing anything of the sort.
They snapped her just as she was leaning past me, reaching for a mint that David offered her. The warm words of comfort coming from her lips at that exact moment were actually, “God, I’d love a Polo [breath mint].”
I wrote to her afterwards, thanking her, and she wrote back offering to be a patron of the Aids Foundation and asking if I would get involved in her landmine charity. We were going to meet up next time we were both in London to discuss it. But there wasn’t a next time.
S Just more than a month later Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. Elton paid tribute to her at her funeral in London’s Westminster Abbey by singing his famous hit song Candle in the Wind. S
‘I’m so sorry. It was a silly falling-out. Let’s be friends'