Trauma of years spent hiding his sexuality from fans — and his father . . .
GEoRGE MICHAEL rose to fame as the funloving, golden boy of pop with a habit of stuffing badminton shuttlecocks into his tight shorts so as to further his appeal to girls. With his hooped gold earrings, bleached hair, fake tan and puppy-dog eyes, the youthful star spent much of the Eighties gamely playing the part of a charttopping pop star alongside Andrew Ridgeley as one half of Wham! — a duo famed for their roster of upbeat hits, including Club Tropicana, I’m Your Man and Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.
Those early years saw newspapers constantly briefed about his rampant heterosexuality. on one occasion, Michael’s cousin, Andros Georgiou, boasted he was in the habit of sleeping with ‘four girls a night’ during tours.
on another, he went on a series of very public dates with the fashionable Hollywood actress Brooke Shields.
A famous, and highly successful, PR stunt saw Michael lead the world to believe he’d pursued an affair with Kathy Jeung, an Asian model who appeared, scantily clad, in one of his raunchy music videos.
Yet while it undoubtedly helped shift records, this image of a starry Lothario was — as we now know — a complete fabrication. For, as he would often tell the world in later years, Michael always knew he was gay.
The fact was hinted at in his 1990 autobiography, Bare, co-written with the journalist Tony Parsons.
In his introduction, the singer, who was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, announced that the womanising pop singer George Michael was little more than a fictional character he had decided to play.
‘I created a man the world could love if they chose to, someone who could realise my dreams and make me a star,’ he said.
His double life, by then an open secret in the music world, had at this point been known to close friends and some family members for years.
At the age of 19, Michael had told a number of confidantes, along with one of his two sisters, that he was sexually attracted to men. However, they advised him against telling his parents or the wider public.
‘I don’t think they were trying to protect my career or their careers. I think they were just thinking of my dad,’ he later said, explaining how both he and those close to him were forced to struggle with the double life he found himself living.
‘Soon after that, everything changed. Aids was just not something I was prepared to bring into my parents’ life. I was too young and immature to know that I was sacrificing as much as I was.’
THE conservative family background that nurtured him influenced much of George Michael’s later life. The son of a hard-working Greek Cypriot immigrant who married an English dancer and ran a restaurant, George was raised in a working-class part of Finchley, North London, and indulged as the only boy in the family.
Success eventually allowed the Panayiotou family to move out to Radlett in Hertfordshire, where George attended Bushey Meads School and met Andrew Ridgeley, with whom he formed Wham! at the tender age of 18.
But the poster boy of Smash Hits magazine spent the next two decades of his career pursuing gay liaisons and at least two long-term love affairs, in conditions of secrecy, while simultaneously being one of the most famous men on the planet.
This masquerade was at times highly stressful and doubtless contributed to his regular bouts of depression.
It also left him with a lifelong persecution complex that saw him constantly complain about what one magazine called ‘the strain of his celebrity status’.
As a result, he never really embraced the stardom that saw him sell 100 million records, have 11 number-one hits and amass an estimated personal fortune of £105 million.
Highly intelligent and charming, he’d also rage at the scrutiny his stardom brought or moan at perceived injustices visited upon him by the pop industry or the forces of law and order.
As far back as 1990, after he’d conquered the U.S. with his debut solo album Faith (which sold 25 million copies worldwide) and was releasing the follow-up Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1, he devoted a cover story in the highly influential Calendar magazine (headlined ‘The reluctant pop star’) to complaining about how he ‘lives in hope of reducing the strain of his celebrity status’.
No less a star than Frank Sinatra was moved to write an open letter urging him to ‘loosen up’. But this stellar advice was ignored.
Even after coming out in the late Nineties, George spent much of his life behind the walls of his North London mansion, smoking vast amounts of marijuana and venturing out on an almost daily basis to pursue sexual liaisons with men on Hampstead Heath.
The original decision to lead a double life was at least partly encouraged by the music industry, which — in an era where gay rights were still in their infancy — felt that homosexuality could damage a performer’s commercial appeal.
Wham! — which George once dubbed ‘all white teeth and silk shorts’ — was signed almost instantly and had overnight success with the 1982 hit Young Guns (Go For It).
He and Ridgeley sold themselves on confidence and sexual brio, though Michael later insisted this, too, was a facade, saying he ‘pretended to be sexually confident’, but was instead deeply insecure about his looks.
After Wham! split amicably in 1986, Michael promptly embarked on a solo career, with the album Faith making him one of the biggest stars in music on both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet that only served to raise his apparent feelings of concern about his sexuality becoming public, causing him to step out of the limelight after the 1988 tour that followed its release.
‘I was terrified of my lifestyle maybe removing my ability to connect to what I did and I freaked out,’ he later recalled.
‘I said: “I don’t think I want to make any more videos. I may never tour again.” I said: “I think I have to step back.” ’
In 1991, shortly after the release of Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1, he met a Brazilian man called Anselmo Feleppa in a hotel lobby and fell head over heels in love.
A few months later, however, Feleppa discovered he had Aids. Michael would spend the next four years secretly nursing him, but Feleppa’s death in 1993 threw the singer into what he later described as a ‘depressive spiral’.
No sooner had he started to recover from his bereavement, however, than Michael learned his mother had cancer.
Her death in 1997 threw him further into depression, a condition that ran in his family.
He began taking large quantities of Prozac and smoking strong ‘skunk’ cannabis.
‘In terms of coming close to saying I don’t want to live, that would have been after my mum died,’ he later admitted.
‘I had this overwhelming feeling that the best was behind me. I so loved my mum and respected her.’
Not helping was the somewhat solitary nature of Michael’s professional life: unlike other successful artists, he often worked alone, writing his own lyrics, playing instruments, overseeing album artwork and directing videos.
But he would go a decade without touring.
ON THE personal front, it’s often claimed that Michael’s sexuality was finally made spectacularly public in 1998, when he was arrested in a Beverly Hills public toilet after propositioning an undercover cop.
Michael would usually endorse this line, telling interviewers that he was ‘subconsciously’ trying to be caught during the notorious incident in order to allow himself to be open about his sexuality.
Yet this version of events is a myth: he had actually chosen to speak publicly about his love life in November 1997, months before the arrest, in a newspaper interview with Parsons. It was headlined ‘I was so lucky to have had Anselmo in my life’ and discussed at length his relationship with his late lover.
Either way, finally acknowledging in public that he was gay was not the release friends hoped. Instead, it seemed to provide Michael with only a temporary respite from his problems.
At the time of his LA arrest, he was in an ‘open’ relationship with Kenny Goss, a Texan art dealer.
In 2006, his sexual appetite landed him in trouble with the law after he was escorted from the Park Lane Hilton having been found wandering the corridors in a balaclava in search of a man he’d met in a bar and arranged to meet for sex. It later emerged he was in the wrong hotel.
In 2009, he reportedly began a newspaper interview at his home in Highgate by sitting at a table with ‘a bag of grass and half-a-dozen pills’ casually displayed on it.
Shortly afterwards, he split from Goss — whom he called one of just three men he ever truly loved, along with Feleppa and his final boyfriend, hairstylist Fadi Fawaz.
By 2011, when he fell ill with pneumonia, it became clear that George Michael’s manic lifestyle was in danger of killing him.
Yet the promiscuity and drugtaking continued. Even when he wasn’t living a double life, it seemed little could stem this hugely gifted, but troubled, pop musician’s appetite for self-destruction.