ELTON UNCENSORED
When he began to thin on top, Elton took drastic measures. But as he admits in this hilarious final extract from his memoirs, the result left him looking like he had a dead squirrel on his head . . .
SOME people are blessed with the kind of face that looks good with a bald head. I am not one of those people. Without hair, I bear a disturbing resemblance to the cartoon character Shrek.
My hair started thinning a little in the early Seventies, but a bad dye job in New York suddenly caused the stuff to stage a mass walkout. By 1976, there was hardly anything left on top. I hated how I looked. But salvation was apparently at hand: I was directed to a man called Pierre Putot in Paris, supposedly a great pioneer in the art of hair transplants.
Undergo a simple procedure, I was told, and I’d be leaving his clinic a changed man.
It didn’t quite work out like that. For one thing, it wasn’t a simple procedure at all. It went on for five hours.
I had it done twice, and both times it hurt like hell.
The technique used had the unappetising name of ‘ stripharvesting’. With a scalpel, Putot took strips of hair from the back of my head and then attached them to the crown.
The sound of the hair being removed was disconcertingly like a rabbit gnawing its way through a carrot.
After the first procedure, I left the clinic reeling in agony, lost my footing as I tried to get into the back of a waiting car and hit the top of my head on the door frame.
It was at that moment I discovered however much a hair transplant hurts, it’s a mere pinprick compared with the sensation of hitting your head immediately after having a hair transplant.
To make matters worse, the transplant just didn’t work. I’m not sure why.
Perhaps it had something to do with the amount of drugs I was taking. Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the one thing they told me I mustn’t do in the weeks after the procedure was wear a hat — advice I chose to ignore completely on the grounds that, without a hat, I now looked like something that turns up towards the end of a horror film and starts strip-harvesting teenage campers with an axe.
My head was covered in scabs and weird craters. I suppose I could have split the difference and worn something lighter than a hat, like a bandana, but appearing in public dressed as a fortune-teller seemed a look too far. Even for me.
The paparazzi became obsessed with getting a photo of me without a hat on, but they were out of luck. I kept a hat on in public more or less permanently for the next decade.
In the late Eighties, just before I got sober, I decided I’d had enough and dyed what was left of my hair platinum blond. Then after I got sober, I had a weave done, where they take what’s left of your hair and attach more hair to it.
I debuted my new look at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. A writer noted that I looked like I had a dead squirrel on my I bedazzled the ‘burglars’ with my wig on back to front head. I was forced to concede he had a point.
Eventually, I gave up and got a hairpiece, made by the people who make wigs for Hollywood movies.
It’s the strangest thing. For years, people were absolutely obsessed with my hair, or lack of it. Then I started wearing a wig and hardly anyone’s mentioned it since.
That said, a wig is not without drawbacks. A few years back, I was sleeping at my home in Atlanta, [Georgia] when I woke up to the sound of voices. I was convinced we were being burgled.
I pulled on my dressing-gown and crept out. Then halfway down the corridor, I realised I didn’t have my hairpiece on.
So I rushed back to the bedroom, reasoning that if I was going to be bludgeoned to death by intruders, at least I wouldn’t be bald when it happened.
Wig on, I went into the kitchen to find two workmen who’d been sent up to fix a leak. They apologised profusely for waking me up.
I couldn’t help noticing they were staring at me. Perhaps they were starstruck, I thought, as I headed back to bed.
Stopping off in the bathroom, I realised that the workmen weren’t bedazzled by the sight of the legendary Elton John. They were bedazzled by the sight of the legendary Elton John with his wig on back to front.
I looked completely ridiculous, like Frankie Howerd after a heavy night in a strong wind.