The phone rang and a familiar voice said: ‘It’s Elton.’ I wish I’d had the balls to say Elton who?
Face to face with a legend... by his biographer Philip Norman
FIFTY years ago, Elton John’s record company bosses gave his career one last throw of the dice. His debut album had flopped, despite them pouring a fortune into it.
So his second album, planned in autumn 1969, was his last chance. It put him on the path to global superstardom and made him a music icon who has now sold more than 3000million records.
But that path also led to addiction, self-destruction and despair, which I documented in my book Sir Elton: The Definitive Biography.
As Elton’s unauthorised biographer, I was resigned to his management’s firm refusal of all access to him.
Then one day the phone rang. “Hi,” a familiar voice said. “This is Elton.” I wish I’d had the balls to say, “Elton who?”.
He went on: “Maybe you’d like to come round for a cup of tea?”
It is the strangest experience, after one has chronicled someone’s whole life at second-hand, finally to meet him.
In person, he is taller than I expected; paler and much thinner. He is wearing a baseball cap, a T-shirt, striped buccaneer pants and purple pointed shoes.
What follows is not an interview. In an interview, one asks questions. But there are next to no questions. He talks for two hours, as if dictating a supplementary chapter – at times, as if to his psychiatrist.
He said: “I just wanted to explain why I couldn’t co-operate while you were writing the book. It was nothing against you personally. It was just when you asked me, I was so totally f***ed up I couldn’t have done anything like that.
“But I’m OK now. I’m quite comfortable about being gay. I’ve resolved every one of the problems I had. I’m happy and optimistic, for the first time ever.”
Even to his biographer, this is pure revelation. Elton seemed to have no more problems left to overcome. As he said: “There was still one thing I hadn’t sorted out. That was me. I was cocaineaddicted. I was an alcoholic. I had a sexual addiction. I was bulimic for six years. It was all through being paranoid about my weight but not able to stop eating. So in the end I’d gorge, then make myself sick.
“For breakfast I’d have a fry-up, followed by 20 pots of cockles and then a tub of ice cream, so I’d throw it all up. I never stood still. I was always rushing, always thinking about the next thing. If I was eating a curry, I couldn’t wait to throw it up so that I could have the next one.”
Drugs, drink and his stupendous fame had turned him into a monster of ego and megalomania to rival any in the rock pantheon. The difference was a normal, sensible part of him could stand back and watch it happening.
He said: “I could be unbelievably horrible and stupid. On tours, I’d walk out of a hotel suite because I didn’t like the colour of the bedspread. I remember looking out of my room one day and saying, ‘It’s too windy. Can someone please do something about it?’.”
Funnily enough, I was in the same hotel suite a few months earlier with James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, when he told me he could make the wind stop whenever he chose. I remember thinking, “I must get those two together”. Elton’s famous tantrums used to astonish him as much as any of their victims. He told me: “What you call ‘Elton’s Little Moments’ in the book is spot on. I never knew where they came from. At one time, I even started having seizures.” He now puts much of the blame on his unhappy, repressed childhood in Pinner, London. He said: “My father never showed me any affection and that made me keep
I was cocaine addicted. I was an alcoholic. I had a sexual addiction. I was bulimic for six years ELTON CONFIDED IN PHILIP
everything in. I was always held up as the paragon of what a child should be, which never left me. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings – like not going on stage and performing when I felt I couldn’t face it. But I always made myself do it. I was too afraid of letting people down.”
Without prompting, he describes his second suicide attempt in November 1975, at the peak of his fame. It was Elton John Week in LA, where his footprints joined those of movie icons on Hollywood Boulevard.
He was playing nightly concerts at Dodger Stadium and one day, when his proud relations were gathered around his swimming pool, he swallowed 60 Valium tablets. He said: “I jumped in in front of my mother and my grandmother, screaming ‘I’m going to die!’ I remember that, as they pulled me out, I heard my gran say, ‘I suppose we’ve all got to go home now’.”
His excesses estranged him from his mother Sheila, that once tireless ally and champion. “My mum had always supported me. But by the mid-80s, even she’d had enough,” he said.
The first straw at which he clutched was having to leave his Old Windsor house during a refurbishment. Lodged in Elton’s mind was the memory of meeting Elvis in 1977, weeks before his death, in a similar suffocating mansion. Elton said: “He looked terrible – bloated with hair dye trickling down his forehead. He had dozens of people around him, supposedly looking after him, but already seemed like a corpse.
“I knew if I didn’t do something, I could end up the same way.”
But he also had to conquer cocaine addiction. The problem was finding a rehabilitation programme. All the big-star clinics turned Elton away, saying he had too many addictions.
The only detox centre that would take him was at the Parkside Lutheran Hospital in Chicago. Inmates had to endure a spartan regime. He said: “When I saw the place, I almost checked out. But then I thought, ‘There’s nowhere else to go’.”
Part of his therapy was to write a letter to cocaine, bidding it farewell. He fetches it. It is a beautiful elegy, as if the wicked white powder were some beautiful, heedless woman. “I have sent cars – even planes – to pick you up...”
One wonders why someone so literate and articulate has always been afraid to write lyrics for his own songs. When he read the letter to his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, it made him weep. Elton also began attending AA meetings in LA and at two centres in London.
He said: “They didn’t care who I was. For the first time in 20 years I could feel totally anonymous.”
But while fame brought huge problems, it also brought moments undreamed of by a boy named Reg from a suburban background – like playing for Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle.
He said: “When I arrived, there was no one there but the band and Princess Diana. We danced the Charleston for 20 minutes. Then Princess Anne came up and said ‘Would you like to dance?’ What am I going to say? ‘No, f*** off ’?
“We went into this disco and the Queen comes up with an equerry and says, ‘Do you mind if we join you?’ Just at that moment, the music segues into Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock.
“So I’m dancing to Rock Around The Clock with the Queen of England.”
Sir Elton: The Definitive Biography, by Philip Norman, Pan, £9.99.