Like his hair and his personality, Elton John’s English country mansion has been refashioned in recent years. The room that was once a discothèque—mirrored ball, amyl nitrite, Village People—now has chintz sofas and deep carpets. The squash court has become a library. The games room has been cleared of rock-and-roll pinball machines and stuffed animals. The outdoor five-a-side football pitch (trimmed with Watford Football Club logos) has been dug up, and in its place is a formal Italian garden, designed by Sir Roy Strong, the former director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum; in it are hedges and little paths, and a twelve-foot obelisk that was mistakenly reported in the British tabloid press to be a thirty-foot statue of a penis, and also to be a possible distraction to air traffic at nearby Heathrow Airport.
No one would call this a house of restraint. Elton John, now forty-nine, does not binge, as he once did, on alcohol, cocaine, food, and spectacles. But he has found other ways of expressing what his former therapist described to me, not unreasonably, as a compulsive personality. Mick Jagger, visiting here recently, said, “I’ve never seen so much fucking porcelain. If I see one more piece of porcelain . . .” Porcelain is one of Elton’s current obsessions, as are flowers (his florists have no other clients) and modern black-and-white photographs (kept in his apartment in Atlanta). He also collects the work of Arthur Devis, the eighteenth, century English portraitist, who did his society subjects the favor of attaching their heads to dazzlingly fashionable clothes they had never owned or worn; it seems right that Elton John, who once played to five hundred thousand people in Central Park while dressed as Donald Duck, eats his lunch under paintings of people not fully at ease with their waistcoats.
Throughout his twenty-seven-year career as a solo singer of melodic pop music (more than forty albums made, hundreds of millions of records sold, a fortune earned), Elton John has often spoken of fresh starts, both personal and professional. He has always enjoyed standing in the light of an alleged new dawn, putting one thing or another—touring, say, or perilously high platform shoes—behind him. Today, he can speak with more confidence than usual about having drawn a line through his past. In his personal life, he is able to celebrate exactly six years of abstinence from alcohol and drugs; his hair, too, has completed some kind of twelve-step program. And he is in a seemingly secure three-year-old relationship. Professionally, he has reason to be satisfied: his music will never again quite storm the world as it did in the first dizzy years of the seventies (when he had seven consecutive No. 1 albums in the United States), but he has pulled himself out of a (relative) eighties slump. He seems to matter. Millions around the world still want him to give their lives a lush, melancholic, American-accented soundtrack—an accompaniment to their seductions, partings, and long-distance car journeys. He is held in great reverence by his younger comrades in pop—George Michael, for instance, who as an adolescent bought every album as it was released. Last year, Elton won an Oscar for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”—his No. 1 single from “The Lion King”—and grossed twenty-two and a half million dollars on a forty-one-concert world tour (he played Madison Square Garden for the forty-fourth time), and this year he has already recorded a single with Luciano Pavarotti and dashed off a stage musical for Disney: “Aida” (as in “Aida”). A compilation, “Love Songs,” is about to be released in the United States.
This is the refurbished Elton, who feels that he has turned off a path leading directly to late-period Elvis Presley: he has founded his own AIDS charity; he seeks to control a famously volatile temper; he hangs out with Mstislav Rostropovich. Certainly his place in the British establishment is still unusual, because he is known to have both danced to “Rock Around the Clock” with the Queen and recommended himself to young men in Studio 54 with talk of hard drugs. (The British tabloid press seems to find it painful not to know for sure if Elton is a national treasure or a raddled old queen.) But it is perhaps significant that an anonymous East End correspondent who was forever sending him photographs cut from the newspapers and embellished with “Wanker!” or “Why don’t you sod off and get a proper job?” has for the moment stopped his abuse.
A few Sundays ago, on what was the hottest day yet of the British summer, Elton John was sitting under his Devis portraits at the head of a long dining table where he has entertained, among other problem eaters, the Princess of Wales and Michael Jackson. The scent of cut flowers was intense. Ice water was served. The sound of fountains outside carried through open doors. The man with whom Elton John lives—David Furnish, a thirty-three-year-old Canadian-born writer and filmmaker—also sat at the table, and sometimes fed grapes to the dogs or offered a gentle insight into his lover’s past or present habits (and was sometimes gently corrected: “I’m not a pop star—I hate that phrase ‘pop star,’ ” Elton said).
Elton John was wearing a pastel Nike polo shirt and loose striped shorts. Like many people at his level of wealth and power, he has often seemed preoccupied by those aspects of his life which resist the impact of wealth and power—in Elton’s case, weight gain and hair loss. Today, after a lifetime of crash dieting (and, more recently, bulimia), he is not fat, but he has something of Bart Simpson’s body profile. His reddish-brown hair—much of it, strictly speaking, not his but a weave (he acknowledged this with a self-mocking look heavenward)—flopped over his forehead. He often put his hands to his fringe, as if about to flick it to one side or the other, but then stopped himself, like someone taking care not to scratch at an insect bite.
This slight awkwardness aside, Elton John seemed relaxed and cheery. As we ate lunch, he slipped in and out of playful high camp: “I don’t know how Mrs. Jagger does it. Mick talks to everybody when she’s got a new album out.” He was articulate and sharp-witted. He laughed a lot—quite often at his own expense. As the hot breeze came in from his Italian garden, he remembered, from the bad old days, another breeze, blowing onto the balcony of an unimaginably expensive hotel suite in central London. Elton John remembered shouting at a member of his entourage, “Can’t you do something about the fucking wind?” (The entourage member: “She’s lost it, she’s finally lost it.”)
Elton John has other topics of conversation (he shows, for example, great enthusiasm for modern pop music: Beck, Portishead, Underworld), but when he talks about himself he does so with merry disrespect and candor. Indeed, during our conversation his candor sometimes seemed almost recklessly unrestrained, to the point where he seemed to be invading his own privacy, bringing up past indiscretions with near-bulimic vigor. He perhaps acquired the habit in the process of recovery (but you can imagine its becoming something from which one might eventually want to recover). Or perhaps he is rebelling against a career spent singing someone else’s (Bernie Taupin’s) lyrics—singing from someone else’s heart. For whatever reason, self-exposure is now his thing—the only form of self-abuse he is allowed. “I fucking loved cocaine,” he told me. “It opened me up. But in the end all I was doing with cocaine was sitting in my room, doing it on my own and watching pornographic videos for two weeks at a time, and being so paranoid that I was creeping about and not wanting anyone to hear me—and it was my house.”
Elton John takes pleasure in the fact that he no longer needs to creep about. Last year, he allowed David Furnish to video his life for a documentary: there was no crew, just Furnish and a camera. At the time of our lunch, the strange and compelling result, “Elton John: Tantrums and Tiaras,” had just been shown on British television (ahead of a planned sale to American television): Elton camping it up here and there; Elton backstage at the Oscars; Elton shopping for Versace shirts—this, this, this, this; and Elton on a video shoot in an amazing full-length leopard-skin coat, shouting, “I’ll do everything my fucking self in the future!” When, in the South of France, his early-morning game of tennis is disturbed by a woman crying “Yoo-hoo!” Elton storms back into his hotel and telephones for a plane to pick him up, saying, “I’m never coming to the South of France again.” A moment later, Elton gives his lover, and therefore the camera, a half smile, as if seeking permission to play out his game. (He did not fly home. “I’m all mouth and no trousers,” he says now.)
In Britain, reactions to all this were mixed. “I thought it was the bravest thing Elton’s ever done,” says Beauchamp (Beechy) Colclough, his friend and former therapist. “I was gobsmacked. He said, Here I am. This is the way I am.’ ” By contrast, Max Clifford, Britain’s master of celebrity public relations, and the man who brought O. J. Simpson to Britain, described it to me as “a very bad idea, because it painted him as someone who’s incredibly rich, incredibly vain, and incredibly empty.”
To its subject, the film is funny and true, even if he can see in himself something of Zaza from “La Cage aux Folles.” Elton said, “I wanted to say, Listen, I’m not Cliff Richard. This is how unbearable I can be, and sometimes how endearing I can be.” Part of Elton wants to be thought real (he always relished the great realness, for example, of becoming chairman of the Watford Football Club, in 1976: drinking shoulder to shoulder with “ordinary people” in the Supporters’ Club), but he also thinks that “a mystique is very important,” and that “to remain successful you have to have that enigma around you.” There seems to be some confusion here, yet in “Tantrums and Tiaras” there was only one point where Elton’s openness failed him, when Furnish affectionately pressed him about his workload, asking, “Do you think you should take a rest?”
“I don’t want to discuss it,” Elton replied, with half-serious petulance.
Furnish then asked, “Are you worried about not having enough balance in your life? What is balance for you?” The answer was “I don’t know. Spending enough time with you, probably. I don’t know.” Elton then looked into the camera and said “Shush” softly.
David Furnish—whose film is inevitably also a kind of self-portrait, a study of life lived in the wake of fame, in the afterglow of flashbulbs—was keen to let me know that the tantrums seen in the program were “really the worst two in the course of a whole year.” There was a pause after he said this, and Elton John said, “No, they weren’t—there was the one at the Albert Hall.” Furnish, now remembering, said, “And there was the one in Brazil . . .”
John Reid, who is Elton John’s manager, and was for a long while his lover, remembers when they first met, in 1970; Elton came into his office, shyly handed him a record, then went away. Reid played it later: “It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside . . .” Reid remembers thinking, “This? Him? I couldn’t put the two together. He was thin, he was good-looking—I always thought he was good-looking—he was funny, but he was shy, and this music was so beautiful and strong. There was nothing apologetic about it, it was confident—a lot of things that were the opposite of what he seemed to be.”
Elton John (né Reginald Dwight) was an awkward, fastidious, list-keeping young man from a North London suburb—an only child. His father, who divorced his mother when Elton was in his mid-teens, was in the R.A.F., and so was often away, and Elton never forgave what he considered his failings as a parent. Elton John’s mother, to whom he is still very close, recently told her son, “I don’t think he liked you very much.” He complained if Elton ate celery too loudly, and forbade him to wear Hush Puppies.
Elton was a talented child pianist, later a Saturday-night pub pianist; later, he played in an R. & B. group called Bluesology. In 1967, he was introduced to a young, unknown lyricist, Bernice Taupin, and together they wrote the songs with which Elton launched a solo career. (“What I do best is write melodies to other people’s lyrics,” Elton says. “I think I’m a good—a great—melody writer. I wish I could write my own lyrics, but I can’t.”) Elton first found fame in America in 1970. “Nobody was doing piano, bass, and drums at that point,” he says. “And nobody was doing things on the piano, apart from Leon Russell.” Elton’s concerts in a Los Angeles club in 1970 were praised to the skies in the press, and a vast American market was soon discovered for this curious new act—effortless melodic songs presented with Jerry Lee Lewis gusto by a man in big boots who accepted that he was “not your actual sex symbol.”
Elton lost his shyness onstage. Having pretty much skipped the Hush Puppies stage, he went directly to the hot-pants-and-fur-coat stage. (Later came Eiffel Tower hats, angel wings, and Mozart wigs. Elton John once asked his friend Bryan Forbes, “How do I acquire taste?”) “Even though I took my music very seriously, I had to be tongue in cheek,” he says. “I was stuck at a seven-foot piano, and there was nothing I could do with it. I was trying to do a Jimi Hendrix with it—I was leaping on it, I was kicking it, I was shoving it—and I don’t think people had seen that for a long time.”
He was, in part, an ironic pop star, banishing shyness by dressing in outfits and lyrics that never quite looked to be his own. This prevented things from becoming too urgent or too dark—too Neil Young—and it provided him with an air of lovable vulnerability, but it was sometimes hard for Bernie Taupin (who today lives in Santa Ynez, California, and answers his telephone from a horse). “Sometimes,” Taupin says, with good humor, “I thought it was detrimental to the content of the song if you’re singing about attempted suicide while jumping up and down on the piano with three-foot boots on and mauve feathers sticking out of your head.”
In an unusual arrangement, Taupin and Elton John never wrote in the same room: Taupin provided John with sheaves of finished lyrics, and John made songs of them as he could. They still use this method. Taupin does not make specific melodic suggestions, although he does now work with a guitar. “I play chords, and almost sing the lyrics in my head, and then it gives me a sense of form, of construction,” he says. “I feel it makes for a better lyric. Some people may say, ‘I liked it in the old days—it was a bit more free form, and it probably pushed Elton a little harder.’ But everything changes.”
Elton John (who does not particularly relish discussion of work, and, unusual for a show-business interviewee, would rather get back to the sex and drugs) says, “I get a lyric from Mr. Taupin, and I look at it, and decide if it is going to be a fast song, a slow song, or a medium-paced song, and then I sit at a keyboard, sometimes with a drum machine, and write a melody.”
He does this at extraordinary speed. If he has made no progress within fifteen minutes, he will abandon the melody. A finished song might take an hour or so, and it is likely to be a very good song. This amazes David Furnish. He calls the process genius—“It does my head in.” This still amazes Bernie Taupin, too. When he and Elton are writing music for an album, and Elton is banging out melody after melody after melody, Taupin sometimes loses faith in a song for a moment, forgetting where he is. “Sometimes,” he says, “I won’t be impressed straightaway—I’ll think, You should have taken a bit more time on that, because it sounds a bit flat and repetitive. And then I’ll hear it again, and I’ll pick up on all these little nuances in the songs, and, really, that’s where his genius lies. He’s got these hooks and turns. Instead of taking the path of least resistance—letting the melody line resolve in the obvious way—he goes against the grain. He’ll do something melodically that you won’t expect.” John Reid, who lived with Elton John for five years, and was the first man Elton slept with, remembers being woken up by Elton in the middle of the night and being played “Candle in the Wind,” written from scratch in half an hour.
The albums of those early years—“Elton John” (which included “Your Song”), “Honky Chateau” (“Rocket Man”), “Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player” (“Daniel,” “Crocodile Rock”), “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (“Candle in the Wind,” “Bennie and the Jets”)—established Elton John as the biggest act in America, the most successful solo artist since Elvis. He became friends with Marc Bolan, John Lennon, and Rod Stewart. He had dinner with Princess Margaret. He bought many things, and made lists of the many things he bought.
“The first five years of my career, I just loved every fucking minute of it,” Elton John says. “I was making two albums a year, touring, I was totally involved, and loved it. I was having a ball. And I think I got so tired. When ‘Blue Moves’ came out”—in 1976—“I knew, instinctively, I’d had my four or five years of being a big cheese, and I’d have to find my feet.”
Elton took me for a walk in his thirty-seven-acre garden. (“The Queen Mother says I’ve got the best view of Windsor Castle in Berkshire,” he told me.) By the tennis court, in the middle of a lawn, there was a tram. Elton explained that it had been shipped from Melbourne at some cost and inconvenience. “That,” he said, “was in the cocaine days. ‘Get me a tram,’ she said.”
Those “Spinal Tap” days: in the years that followed “Blue Moves,” there were any number of sold-out stadium performances, and gold and platinum disks (he has shimmering corridors of them at home, floor to ceiling for mile after mile), but complacency crept in along with tiredness. (He could see it in himself: “When I saw the Sex Pistols slagging me off on television, I thought, Yes you are a lazy fat cunt.”) He began to drink and take cocaine on a grand scale. In Bernice Taupin’s phrase, Elton could be “Santa Claus one minute, the Devil incarnate the next.” On a video shoot in the South of France, for “I’m Still Standing” (1983)—a song that later acquired recovery resonance—Elton guzzled eight vodka Martinis in thirty minutes. He woke to find a trashed room, and was told that, following an argument”—something to do with a boyfriend”-he had “got hold of John Reid, sat on top of him, and punched and punched and punched him,” until his nose was broken.
“Cocaine was a social thing at first,” Elton says. “And it was a great sexual thing for me, too. I found it sexually stimulating.” He relished cocaine’s “complete dissolving of inhibitions, the fantasy of it.” (In 1976, he had told Rolling Stone he was bisexual—a statement that, although not true, was brave. Earlier that year, he had become chairman of Watford, and fans of opposing teams were then duty-bound to sing rhyming obscenities about his imagined sexual practices.) He told his biographer, Philip Norman, that he “took hostages” rather than formed relationships. He said to me, “I used to see someone in a bar, and already plan the relationship—I had never met them. I’d see someone and think, Oh”—sigh—“you’re fabulous. I’d already be living with them.” His likely line on making an approach would be “Would you like to come back to the house and have some drugs?” He recalls, “The trouble is, if you want to pick up a busboy you have to wait until the fucking club closes. And by the time you get home you’re like that”—he mimes cocaine-inspired rigor mortis. Elton John has tested negative for H.I.V.: he says he was fortunate in his sexual tastes, which inclined toward voyeurism.
In 1984, to the amazement of many, Elton John married Renate Blauel, a German-born sound engineer. “It was basically dishonest,” he says now. “I was so unhappy, I thought that any sort of change . . . When you take a lot of drugs, and you’re out to lunch half the time, you think a change of scenery . . . I’ll get another house, I’ll move to another country.” The couple were separated in 1988. The same year, Elton won a record million pounds in an out-of-court libel settlement with the Sun for stories that alleged implication in a “shocking drugs and vice scandal.” Elton said at the time, “They can say I’m a fat old cunt, they can say I’m an untalented bastard, they can call me a poof, but they mustn’t tell lies about me.”
At the end of the eighties, with the encouragement of his then boyfriend, Elton began to seek help for his various addictions. (At an initial therapy session, he and his lover were asked to list each other’s failings. His boyfriend talked of Elton’s problems with alcohol and cocaine, while Elton John began, “Hugh never puts his CDs away tidily.”) In 1990, Elton checked in to the Parkside Lutheran Hospital, in Chicago, where he had to share a room, do his own laundry (“I had no idea how to work a washing machine”), and write a farewell letter to cocaine. Six weeks—and only one major tantrum—later, the regime had done its work. “I now think I know myself pretty well,” Elton says. “I know what I can and can’t do. I would like to have a drink, and I’d love to have the ability to have one line of coke—and have a great time—or one Ecstasy, but I can’t do it.” In the first years of the nineties, he attended a total of fifteen hundred meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and others—he kept a list-but he stopped three years ago, when he saw a new addiction looming. He met David Furnish—then in advertising—while he was making a concerted effort to break out of his A.A. circle. He told a friend, “You know, I’d like to meet some gay people”—he had company, rather than romance, in mind—and the friend asked a few friends if they’d like to go up to his house. Furnish went out of curiosity, half expecting to find a glittery freak in a private rock-and-roll hall of fame.
Elton John: “You expected me to stand there in a glittery costume and a pair of high-heeled shoes?” Furnish: “I expected you to be glittery.”
In the mock-Augustan dining room of Elton John’s redecorated house, the lunch plates were cleared away by a housekeeper. Dogs ran here and there. Elton sang a line from a song by Beck: “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” David Furnish described an exhibition he is helping to curate as part of the first Florence Biennale, opening in September. “I’m putting together a retrospective of Elton’s eyeglasses and stage costumes in a space at the Uffizi,” he said. Furnish has a collection of three thousand spectacles from which to choose: these survived a purge of Elton artifacts auctioned in 1989.
At my request, Elton put on a rough recording of “Aida,” the musical he has written, with Tim Rice. (“Aida”—a working title—is one of several Disney stage musicals currently in development; another is “The Lion King.” These will eventually follow “Beauty and the Beast” to Broadway.) From his place at the head of the table, Elton turned up the volume by remote control, and we spent some time in the peculiar golden medium of future hit songs. Staying in his seat, Elton John did something that millions have done but not all would admit to: he sang along quite loudly to Elton John. He closed his eyes slightly, put his head to one side, and lost his former air of smiling self-mockery. David Furnish sang along, too, but with less abandon.
Elton told me that he had written and recorded “Aida” in nineteen days—a song a day. I asked him, “Could we call that, say, a million dollars a day?” He said, “Probably,” rather sheepishly, and tried not to smile. He can’t figure out what other songwriters do with their time. “I mean, Lionel Richie was making that album”—“Louder Than Words”—“for eight years. Eight years! Fucking hell. I said to him, ‘Lionel, what do you do every day? You don’t play golf. What do you do?’ ”
Elton John doesn’t play golf, because he is no good at it. He plays a lot of tennis. He gives Jon Bon Jovi advice about interior design. (“I’ve become the Martha Stewart of the rock-and-roll generation,” he says.) He eats in the Bibendum restaurant, in South Kensington, and goes to the cinema in the afternoons, perhaps in Chelsea. He shops. He writes music, always up against his deadline. (He told me he had just written an additional song for the stage version of “The Lion King”: “I call it ‘The Hyena Slobber Song.’ It’s come to this.”) He no longer goes to night clubs, but he does go out at night. Two days after our Sunday lunch, I met him at the premiére of “Lord of the Dance,” a show based on Irish dancing, whose star is also managed by John Reid. It was a sweltering, stormy night. During the intermission, Elton found a quiet corner, where he was drinking water out of a champagne glass and was surrounded by friends from Atlanta—mostly tanned youngish men in beautifully pressed shirts. Disappointed by the air-conditioning, they were cooling one another with tiny handheld electric fans, and Elton was losing some private battle to be diplomatic about the production. “I’m calling it ‘Hitler Was Irish,’ ” he said. Then, looking around, he added, with irony, “All the big stars are here!”
At the party afterward, in a grand high room in the Savoy Hotel, he told me, “Audiences have always been very kind to me—very generous and very warm—and I never knew how to respond to that. I was always embarrassed by it, I didn’t know how to accept praise.” In common with his other life rethinkings, he is paying attention to this, and making progress. He said he remembered the Donald Duck outfit he wore at the free Central Park concert in 1980: a huge, complicated thing with a bill and a protruding tail—all mouth and no trousers. Despite all the help given him by Bob Halley, his long-serving assistant, he couldn’t get into the costume, and he became convinced that the audience would leave before he was ready: “I put my legs in the armholes and arms in the legholes, and I’m saying to Bob, ‘They’re going to go.’ He’s saying, ‘There are five hundred thousand people out there, dear. They’re not going to go. Get in.’ ” ♦
