ELTON JOHN: FAMILY LIFE SAVED ME FROM MYSELF
IT was his idols The Beatles who sang “money can’t buy me love” but the lyrics could well have been written about pop legend Sir Elton John.
At first girlfriends, then boyfriends came and went, and his audiences, though adoring, always disappeared home at the end of the night, leaving the singer from Pinner alone with a cavernous emotional void.
None of them supplied the genuine love he craved. So instead, he became a self-confessed shopping addict, hooked on buying possessions by the truckload. This was a man who would take a shopping trolley around Cartier.
Yet despite his bottomless wallet, he was never able to buy enough to fill the emptiness inside, no matter how many bouquets he ordered to fill his glorious homes.
Of course, none of his other addictions had managed to satisfy him either. I described yesterday how he told me candidly about his demons – alcohol, cocaine and toxic comfort eating when we met. Thankfully, a stint in rehab helped him conquer them.
So what was this elusive love Elton was searching for?
Feeling let down by his own mother and father, I believe for many decades he was looking for the love of surrogate parents. And that, of course, is the greatest irony of all. For ultimately, it turns out it has not been finding stand-in parents, people to pamper, indulge, to infantilise him, which has made Elton truly happy for the first time in his life.
It has instead been finding a husband in his partner of more than 25 years and “soulmate”, film producer David Furnish. And most surprising of all, it has been becoming a parent himself, to his two sons Zachary and Elijah, now aged eight and six.
AND I imagine this comes as no bigger surprise to anyone than 72 year-old Elton, who never saw himself as a dad.
“I always said no to having kids,” he once conceded. Because I’m too old, too set in my ways, too selfish, and the lifestyle doesn’t suit me.”
All that began to shift the day he met David in October 1993.
“I wanted to meet new people so I rang up a friend in London and said, ‘Could you please rattle some new people together for dinner here Saturday?’”
Among those new faces was Canadian advertising executive Furnish, who’d not been particularly keen on coming along.
He soon changed his tune – the mutual attraction between the pair was immediate. Elton said: “He had a real job, his own apartment, a car. He was independent. I didn’t need to take care of him.”
The next day Elton called David, who is 15 years his junior, to invite him round for a Chinese takeaway.
Right from the start theirs was an equal relationship; there was nothing parental or manager/superstar about it.That David has refused to be a parent figure to him, has actually been the key to their success.
David was not frightened to tell him what was what.We see that very clearly in Tantrums And Tiaras, the candid documentary they made together about Elton in 1997.
Elton once said: “I knew he was the one because he is not afraid of me. He always tells me exactly what he thinks.”
Yet David and Elton still clearly have a deeply affectionate, romantic relationship. The pair still write each other a letter every Saturday, the weekday they met, no matter where in the world they are.
They entered into a civil partnership in 2005, and in 2014 after the law changed, got married.
“For David and I, being able to openly love and commit to one another, and for that to be recognised and celebrated, is what makes life truly worth living,” Elton wrote afterwards.
The stability of their relationship enabled Elton to think the previously unthinkable – becoming a dad.
In 2009 he and David attempted unsuccessfully to adopt a little boy called Lev and his brother, who he’d met on a visit to a Ukrainian orphanage. That was a tipping point. It
‘For David and I, being able to commit to one another is what makes life truly worth living’
seemed a natural progression to have their own sons, via the surrogate, they say they “love as a sister” in California.
Elton has now made the decision to retire from touring, to be home with his lads in Windsor, to do the school run, making sure they do chores, tidy their rooms, teaching them values of kindness and watching them play football.
Elton the father is not the Elton I met. For the first time his life is about other people, not him, and he admits he has never felt so content within an environment which previously would have felt mundane.
He explained recently: “It’s fantastic being a dad. But 10 years ago if you’d have told me that, I’d have said you’re crazy. I have learned that a parent’s capacity for love is endless.”
So in giving so much love, it seems to have finally sated his own need to be loved – something which always struck me as firmly rooted in what he believes was, in large part, an unhappy childhood. Elton has repeatedly talked about how he feels let down by his parents.
The pictures he paints of his mother and father, Sheila and Stanley Dwight are always fraught with emotion.
Of Stanley, he said: “He was a tough and unemotional man. Hard. In the RAF. He was dismissive, disappointed and finally absent. I just wanted him to acknowledge what I’d done. But he never did.”
Others have disagreed, and certainly I have been told Stanley would take his son to football matches, and even bought the child prodigy his first piano.
But whether completely true, partly true, or not true at all, Elton has held on to the negative.
He was much closer to his mother Sheila, but again the relationship seems to have carried its own share of resentment.
He now says: “She always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy, always seemed to be in search of a fight”.
The pair were estranged for years. She infamously invited an Elton lookalike to her 90th birthday.
Sheila maintained she never actually got to meet her grandchildren. Elton on the other hand now says it was her choice not to meet Zachary and Elijah.
Elton once explained: “I don’t hate her, but I don’t want her in my life.”
She in turn told him: “I love you but I don’t like you at all.”
They only reconciled around year before Sheila’s death in 2017. But a friend of hers who remained in contact until the end confided to me that relations were never as good before her death as Elton has suggested publicly.
One comment Sheila made to the same friend was that “Himself”, as she unflatteringly called Elton, only stopped shouting at people when he was performing.
With all this baggage, perhaps it makes sense that the best remedy for an unhappy childhood, is to give a happy one to others. Just as he’s doing with his two boys.
Responsibility for two little people has transformed him from the man-child he’s been most of his life.
Until Elton became a father, he could never truly grow up himself. He was stuck.
Even David allowed Elton his outbursts. But his kids won’t. His decision to be there for his boys by retiring from touring says it all.
After Zachary’s birth he said: “Everything is about him now.” And it is. He’s putting them first, and wants to be there for them, their first days at school and other landmark moments. He said: “They know what their daddy does but I never bring Elton home.”
Nor, importantly, does he want to be the distant dad he recalls his own father was to him.
He’s chosen to be hands on, to pick them up at the school gate where he’s not a global music icon but just another dad discussing lessons, packed lunches and school uniforms.
“My children need to be with me and I need to be with them,” he said.
As a godparent to Sean Lennon, he saw how his friend John was absent for much of his young life.
When I wrote my biography of Lennon, Yoko Ono, told me that making Elton the boy’s godfather had a touch of the mercenary. “John said the because Elton was gay, he wouldn’t have any kids of his own to leave his money to.”
How wrong that turned out to be.