KEY TO HIS LIFE
made me puke — hello? Talk about God’s way of telling you to leave it at that.”
But John didn’t.
He always had an addictive personality. As a child, John had to buy every new record. As an adult, is fancies turned to pricey objects — expensive cars, paintings, houses.
Now he added drugs to the mix. On tour, one staffer was in charge of the cocaine. Another was kept busy, just rolling joints. John’s substance abuse became legendary, and this was by 1970s rock-star standards.
“Once again, you might think this would have given me pause for thought,” he says.
“The next 16 years were full of incidents that would have given any rational human being pause for thought… (But) because I was doing coke, I wasn’t a rational human being.”
He spun out of control. He threw idiotic tantrums, once demanded his record company change the weather. He wrecked hotel rooms and relationships. He developed eating disorders and attempted suicide.
He even tried getting married — to a woman. It lasted four years, and he refuses to say anything more about it.
Finally, in 1990, John did what he should have done in the beginning: He got clean. It took weeks in rehab, and just about every kind of Anonymous — Alcoholics, Cocaine, Anorexics, Bulimics.
Later, he would reach out to other celebrities he knew were in trouble.
Some listened; he became Eminem’s AA sponsor. Others, however, rebuffed his offer. The late Whitney Houston wouldn’t return his calls. The late George Michael told him to mind his own business.
They weren’t John’s only feuds. He had a falling out with Princess Diana when she backed out of writing a foreword to a book for an AIDS charity. A collaboration with Tina Turner collapsed when she told him, “You wear too much Versace and it makes you look fat.”
He remained estranged from his disapproving father. His mother, who seemed to accept his being gay, suddenly turned against him when he married his partner, David Furnish.
John eventually patched up relationships with Turner and Princess Di. Although he never reconciled with his parents, he and Furnish now have their own family, two boys by a surrogate mother. John’s current tour is, he maintains, his farewell. He leaves as a legend. And yet he still obsesses over some of his mother’s last words to him — “I love you, but I don’t like you at all.” And he still feels his father’s constant disapproval.
“I still think I’m sometimes trying to show my father what I’m made of,” he says. “And he’s been dead since 1991.”
To the rest of the world, he may be the glittering, glamorous, fabulous Elton John.
But in his heart, he’ll always be lonely, little Reggie Dwight, sitting at the living room piano, hoping someone favors him with a smile.