‘If they scream at me, it’s probably in horror. I’m like a gorilla… so ugly’
An explosive new biography – with previously unpublished recollections of Elton John himself – reveals how a suicidal and out-of-control Rocket Man almost crashed and burned in his darkest decade of drink, drugs and diva mania
Elton John’s family and bandmates were sitting beside the pool at his Los Angeles mansion when a visibly distraught Elton emerged from his room and made a dramatic declaration. ‘I’m going to be dead in an hour,’ he announced. ‘I’ve taken sleeping pills.’ He stumbled past them all and threw himself into the swimming pool.
It was October 1975, two days before the first of two massive shows at LA’s Dodger Stadium that would mark the peak of Elton’s stratospheric American success.
Days earlier, in a lime-green suit and bowler hat, riding a customised golf cart, Elton had unveiled his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Six thousand fans had stopped the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, yelling: ‘We want Elton!’
As his startled mother and stepfather looked on, Elton was dragged out of the pool of his Benedict Canyon mansion. Medics quickly arrived and pumped the singer’s stomach of 60 Valium tablets.
He had attempted suicide before, at the age of 21, when he put his
‘He stumbled past them all and threw himself into the swimming pool’
head in the oven at his London flat, having reluctantly become engaged to his pregnant girlfriend. As suicide attempts go, that one was preposterous: he’d set the gas to ‘low’ and left the windows open. His friend and writing partner Bernie Taupin had found him and pulled his head out.
Elton’s attempt in Los Angeles was far more serious. Wrecked by cocaine and overwork, Elton was in the grip of an acute emotional crisis. He was rushed to hospital, leaving his relatives and bandmates standing helplessly at the poolside. With an impeccable sense of bathos, the singer’s 75year-old grandmother Ivy sighed and sadly said: ‘I suppose we’ve all got to go home now.’
The young man previously known as plain old Reg Dwight achieved vertical take-off in America in the Seventies. From 1970 to 1976, he was unstoppable – the true successor to The Beatles in terms of sheer popular phenomenon, scoring seven consecutive No.1 albums in the US, along with 14 top 10 singles. It was a dizzying and unpredictable trip, which found him hanging out with old Hollywood royalty and becoming ever more extroverted as he increasingly relied on cocaine to fuel his fantastic voyage. His is the tale of the bashful kid who turned into a superhero – and nearly killed himself in the process.
Until the age of 21, Elton lived with his mother Sheila and stepfather Fred in a small London flat. Shortish at 5ft 8in, he struggled with his weight, and his glasses constantly slipped down his snub nose.
He worked unpaid in a Soho record shop during the week, got up early on Sunday mornings to play football and enjoyed jotting down his thoughts on the films he’d seen at the cinema.
In reality, Reg’s life wasn’t as ordinary as it seemed. In 1968, aged 20, he’d begun living a strange, parallel existence as Elton John – a stage name created by combining the names of two musicians in his former band, Bluesology. A longtime sideman who hammered away in the corner on his Vox Continental organ, he harboured a strong desire – highly unlikely if you were to take just one look at him – to become a pop star.
Sometimes this shy and funny individual would suddenly erupt with excitement at the very thought. ‘I’m going to be a star, do you hear me?’ he’d loudly declare, with comic drama. ‘A star!’
In lyricist Taupin, who, like Reg, had answered an ad for songwriters and musicians from a London music publisher, he had found his lifelong collaborator. But his first two albums initially flopped, including the second, entitled Elton John, which contained the future classic Your Song.
‘He’s got no chance,’ one booking agent was overheard saying at a show, as the future star, in Mickey Mouse T-shirt and round John Lennon glasses, tried his hardest. ‘I just can’t see him on stage at Madison Square Garden.’ In Paris, the crowd booed and lobbed tomatoes at Elton and his band.
As a last roll of the dice, his record label spent £5,000 to send him to Los Angeles in August 1970, where, to his horror and humiliation, he had to ride into the city on a red London bus bearing a huge banner that
screamed ‘Elton John has arrived’.
Miraculously, in front of a crowd at the hip Troubadour club that included Neil Diamond, Quincy Jones and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, Elton was a sensation, thundering through his repertoire and doing handstands on his keyboard in yellow bell-bottomed dungarees and white boots affixed with green bird wings. A shocked Diamond was cheering so loudly that he spilled his drink.
‘I was leaping on the piano,’ recalls Elton, still thrilled by the memory. ‘People were going: “Oh my God.” Right place, right time, and you seize those opportunities.’
He and Bernie were instantly embraced by the LA music community. They were taken to visit the Beach Boys’ drug-damaged leader Brian Wilson, already a fan, who answered his intercom singing the hook of Your Song maniacally sped up: ‘I-hope-youdon’t-mind-I-hope-you-don’tmind-I-hope-you-don’t-mind.’
‘He went upstairs to introduce us to the kids – woke them up,’ remembers Elton. ‘“This is Elton John, I-hope-you-don’t-mind.” Bernie and I were freaking out. We hadn’t taken a drug in our lives.’
The rest of the world soon followed LA’s lead.
As unlikely as it might once have seemed, Elton quickly attracted a devoted army of teenage fans, who created chaotic scenes on his early tours. Elton’s joking exterior masked genuine unease.
‘If they scream at me,’ he quipped, ‘it’s probably in horror,’ though he acknowledged that ‘to be on stage and see some 16st girl hurtling towards you is a frightening sight. There were times when I thought the fans would rip us apart’.
In a pop universe ruled by stars such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger, Elton acknowledged he was an anomaly. He knew he couldn’t possibly compete with the likes of Bowie or Jagger when it came to their slinky stagewear. ‘I went the more humorous route because a) I was stuck at the f ****** piano and b) I never saw myself as a sex symbol.’
He would remain insecure about his looks. When he saw himself on screen at the London premiere of Marc Bolan’s Born To Boogie film, in which he performed Children Of The Revolution with Bolan and Ringo Starr, he couldn’t help but wince. ‘I look like a f ****** gorilla,’ he said. ‘So ugly.’
Privately, Elton had also always suspected he was gay. Travelling into London’s West End on underground trains in his days as a jobbing songwriter, he would find himself eyeing the guys but not the girls. His relationships with the opposite sex – like his abandoned engagement to girlfriend Linda Woodrow – who never did have his child – had always been awkward and doomed to failure.
It took John Reid, a music-obsessed Scot two years his junior, who became his manager and boyfriend in 1971, to confirm Elton’s sexual proclivities.
Returning from a highly significant night with Reid in San Francisco, he admitted to a friend: ‘I’m definitely gay.’
Elton and Bernie wrote at a phenomenal rate and Elton recorded constantly, releasing 10 albums between 1970 and 1976, including classics such as Tumbleweed Connection, Honky Château and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
It is often forgotten that Elton was both as cool and as musically influential in that decade as Bowie, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones – none of whom sold as many albums as he did during the Seventies.
He was soon rolling in money. In one summer in LA, he filled 67 suitcases and 32 trunks with records, books, clothes and jewellery.
He bought etchings by Rembrandt and paintings by David Hockney. He would ostentatiously waltz into Tower Records on Sunset Strip and spend as much as $6,000 on records and tapes in one quick splurge.
For Elton, this was less a vulgar extravagance than a desire to live only for today.
‘My attitude to money is that tomorrow I could be knocked down by a No.9 bus or something, so I might as well spend it.’
Another sign of Elton’s growing stardom was the magnitude of the stars in whose company he found himself.
In LA, he would take Mae West out for afternoon tea. Katharine Hepburn visited his bungalow in Surrey, to use his pool when she was staying nearby. Groucho Marx was another friend from the days of old Hollywood, and, even at 81, his sense of humour was as razoredged as ever.
The pair once went to see a theatre performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. As the theatre lights dimmed, Marx barked: ‘Does it have a happy ending?’
‘He never could figure out why I was called Elton John and said I should be called John Elton. I’ve got a Marx Brothers poster signed by him: “To John Elton from Marx Groucho.”’
As Elton’s popularity boomed, so did his appetite for onstage flamboyance. On one US tour he wore a huge pair of glasses costing $5,000. When the show reached the Hollywood Bowl,
‘My attitude to money is that tomorrow I could be knocked down by a bus so I might as well spend it’