Elton John at 50

This story was originally published in the July 10-24, 1997, issue of Rolling Stone.

Elton John‘s house in Windsor, England, is almost suffocating under the odor of tuberoses. It’s a heavy, funeral-parlor smell wafting up from the French scented candles that he has lit in every room, even at midday. It’s all part of his new class act now that he’s 50, clean and sober, and has hitched up with a nice Canadian filmmaker and has just spent several years at enormous expense converting his estate, Woodside, from what he describes as a typical rock & roller’s pad, complete with pinball machines and jukeboxes, into a stately home filled with miles of parquet floors, paintings by Gainsborough and Venetian masters, and lots of Meissen china — the kind your grandmother would have if she were rich and tasteful. Anyway, it should be a stately home — after all, it was built at the turn of the century, it has two lakes, 37 acres of grounds, a garden of all-white flowers and an Italian garden designed by the former head of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It looks out toward the queen’s castle and even, reputedly, has a ghost — although John has never seen it. In the living room there are huge, overstuffed sofas groaning under tapestried pillows, a gas fire under fake logs, a staff of five tiptoeing about, including a butler with a cockney accent who is wearing striped trousers but no cutaway jacket or white gloves. His name is George, and he and Elton are on a first-name basis.

John gives me a tour of Woodside, pointing out the statues of Roman emperors, the yards of painted boy flesh in canvases by Victorian pedophile Henry Scott Tuke, the wooden bedstead created for John by the Viscount Linley, showing me the Princess Bedroom (“This is where you’ll stay, dear”), drawing my attention to photos of himself in drag (“My Audrey Hepburn look”) and with the Absolutely Fabulous cast. He is especially proud of his paper shredder, into which he inserts hate mail sent by religious bigots. From an upstairs window, we can see a new artificial lake that contains 3 million gallons of water.

Elton John at 50 is warm and well-spoken and shy and eager to please. You’ve even got to like his hair, every fiber of which represents a megainvestment of money, technology and willpower. You could picture John as a tireless consumer if you like. He shells out hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy his clothes and glasses — so many pairs that he regularly sells them off to benefit his AIDS foundation. He’s the ultimate shopper — for old-master paintings, high heels, photos. In his house he has a room the size of a small Tower Records store lined with thousands of CDs, all alphabetized with what he calls his “anal retentive” compulsiveness. Next to it is an even larger video library with shelves that glide on wheels to give access to other, hidden shelves. His book library is two stories tall and stocked with biographies and art books, all focused around a large self-portrait by scary English expressionist Francis Bacon (“I always thought it was a picture of me, broken and small,” John confides). In his Atlanta apartment, he has so many pictures of naked men by the world’s greatest photographers — including Greg Gorman, Herb Ritts and Robert Mapplethorpe — that John’s mother once asked him, “Do you buy these by the dozen, darling?”

“Of course,” as John adds, “there are pictures of women as well. But I do like a nice naked man, don’t you, love? That’s going to be the title of my next book: I Do Like a Nice Naked Man.”

You could just as easily see him as a giver. In his old cocaine-snorting days, he liked to pick up boys and “Eltonize” them — that is, give them clothes, jewels, hopes and aspirations. “If you want to have an orgasm, take cocaine,” John declares flatly. “I’d walk into a bar and see a guy, and have the wedding planned and the complete relationship worked out before we’d even said hello.”

Now he likes to entertain friends, give dinners, even big weekend parties. Last summer he invited a gang of Atlanta friends over to Windsor to escape the Olympics.

IN MARCH, ELTON JOHN TURNED 50, to a lot of fanfare. Literally. He gave a party for 500 friends and, entering to a row of trumpeters, appeared all in white as Louis XIV, with a small Spanish galleon perched in his wig. The costume alone cost more than $80,000. He looks great — pink-cheeked, unlined, galvanized with energy, with his small, chubby hands, lopsided smile and just a bit of his shaved chest visible beneath his squishy-sounding black track suit trimmed in green. He has a funny, knock-kneed way of walking, almost as though he’s a windup doll that’s been overwound and sent heading for the top of the stairs — there’s something reckless and unreflecting and determined about every movement he makes.

He has an AA way of talking positively about himself and about his work, and though he’s sent letters to everyone apologizing for his past mistakes, he’s “a very tomorrow kind of person,” as he puts it — “no looking back.” What was surprising for me was his way of grafting an American-style 12-step rap onto a nice, English middle-class manner, for he is well brought up and self-mocking, always quick to take the piss out of himself. He seldom lets the conversation wander from the topic of Elton John, but he is interested in the people around him and does ask questions. He is at home at Woodside, but the whole place looks like an oversize stage-set version of English country life — which only makes sense, since he says that onstage is “the only place I feel safe.” Like so many performers, he’s shy but constantly daring himself to be extroverted. AA attempts to deflate the ego, and John has picked up the lingo — and achieved sobriety. He also has turned the whole act into just another way of grandstanding. But if he’s full of himself, he’s also an affectionate man, touching in his desire to please, camp in the old English way, clever and cultured and experienced.

ELTON JOHN WAS BORN REGINALD KENNETH DWIGHT in a small house belonging to his grandparents, in a London suburb on March 25, 1947. His mother had wanted a girl, and for a while, baby Reggie had all the golden curls she might have fancied and that John would pine for years later. His father was a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force who was seldom at home, and his grandfather left the rearing of the prodigy to the child’s mother and grandmother. “I don’t think your father liked you,” John’s mother, Sheila, flatly declared not long ago. John certainly was a prodigy — by the time he was 3, he could hear a piece of music and play it on the piano. When he was 11, he won a four-year scholarship to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music.

“I never had fabulous sexual interludes as a child,” John tells me. “At all my AA meetings and when I saw my shrink in Atlanta, people were always asking me if I was ever molested as a child. I told my shrink, ‘I was dying to be molested.’” Maybe Reg was neglected by pedophiles because he was unattractive. His biographer Philip Norman writes: “A school photograph, taken when he was about 13, shows a boy no longer just chubby or plump but unequivocally fat, his hair mousy dark, his round pug face resignedly studious in half-frame glasses.”

He was a quiet boy, obsessively collecting his records, which he would never lend to friends — they might soil the sleeve or scratch something! He loved Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis because they were outrageous. Radio stimulated his imagination, especially radio plays, with all their eerie sound effects. He spent most of his free time alone in his room cataloging and listening to his records. His only outings for fun were to attend soccer matches, especially those of his local Watford team; soccer was the only interest he shared with his remote father.

The word homosexual was never even mentioned in Britain in the 1950s. “The first gay person I saw on TV was a hero of mine, Liberace,” John says. “Of course, Liberace never said he was gay — he didn’t have to, did he, dear? Oh, my mother and I loved that glamorous side of America that we saw in the early days of TV, all those dancers and fountains on The Perry Como Show and The Andy Williams Show. And Liberace’s glamour — my mother was enthralled! He was what every straight person wants to think gay people are like — so camp, not at all threatening. Much later, in 1972 or so, I did the Royal Variety Show with Liberace. We shared a dressing room. I thought, ‘God, I’d better make an effort.’ I had two fabulous Lurex suits run up. Then he wheeled in trunk after trunk, including a suit covered with electric light bulbs. I knew I was outclassed. How could he play the piano with all those rings on? Maybe that’s why he missed some of the notes — he had fun. He said ‘Fuck you’ to everyone.”

Before he got to co-star with Liberace, however, Reg had to pass through a lot of stages. By the time he was 15, he was playing the piano and singing in a local pub, mainly Ray Charles ballads. A year later, he joined a band called Bluesology and put together a demo and a few club dates. Though he was roly-poly and dressed in a tweed jacket, it was little Reg who could sing and play, and who, even then, would do anything to make an impression. He emerged in the U.S. only in 1970, three years after he had changed his name to Elton John. At the time, he had recorded his hit single “Your Song” and had come over to promote the album; his first date was at the 300-seat Troubadour, in Los Angeles, a folkie venue. Every time he performed a cut off the album, the audience broke into applause. “They clapped at the start!” John declared the next day. “I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it.”

Soon, John was so exhilarated by his American triumph that he’d overcome his shyness and reluctance to perform live. As Rolling Stone reported at the time, in Santa Monica, Calif., “during ‘Burn Down the Mission,’ Elton kicked away the piano stool, ripped off his jumpsuit and finished with a series of giant bunny kicks in purple pantyhose. The crowd, to use Elton’s term, ‘went mental.’”

A tune like “Your Song” struck Americans as mellow and sweet but not in the lugubrious, sedated, Simon and Garfunkel style. It was distinct — nothing like the Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin or the Stones. In fact he emerged in the vacuum created by the breakup of the Beatles; the introspective ballads of their vintage years obviously inspired him. What made him his own man, however, was his brilliant piano playing, especially on 1972’s “Rocket Man” and 1973’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

John’s success largely depended on an earlier event — his collaboration with English lyricist Bernard Taupin, whom he had met in 1967. Whereas John was a composer who couldn’t invent words, Taupin was a wordsmith without a tune in his head. Taupin’s lyrics were individualistic and often rebellious: “You know you can’t hold me forever/I didn’t sign up with you/I’m not a present for your friends to open/This boy’s too young to be singing the blues” (“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”). These searching words, combined with John’s plain looks and outrageous outfits, said to his public (even then), “I do whatever I want, and so should you.”

At first, Taupin and John were roommates. “I had a crush on Bernie,” John confides. “He was like the brother I never had. Of course, there was no sex — Bernie’s straight — but he was so shy, and I became very attached. In fact, he was the first person I ever fell in love with. Now he has a ranch in Santa Barbara [Calif.], he’s living with his third wife, he has two step-daughters — and he’s never been so happy. We talk from time to time, but he just faxes me his new lyrics.”

John met his first lover after three years of unrequited love for Taupin. It was August 1970, and John had just scored his Troubadour triumph and was playing in San Francisco when he ran into John Reid, a 20-year-old English bloke who was then the label manager for Motown in Britain. John was ecstatic about his recent reviews and just had to share the news with a fellow Brit. “I didn’t have sex until I was about 23,” John admits. “And then it didn’t stop. John Reid was the beginning. He was in San Francisco on a Motown convention, and I was on tour. We had an early dinner, and I said to myself, ‘If it’s ever going to happen, it’s going to happen now.’ I’d known him before, in London, and I thought he was very attractive. We lived together for five years, but in the end he was more unfaithful than I liked. I’m even worse now that I’m sober — very picket fence, dear. He became my manager, and even after the romance ended, our professional relationship continued, and it’s one of the strongest I’ve had in my life.”

He lived with John Reid in London. Elton’s mother never blinked twice. In fact, after she divorced his father and took up with a new man, Fred “Derf” Farebrother (whom she married before long), it was Farebrother who decorated John and Reid’s new place, and it was Sheila who received the press and posed for the photographers. She seemed to accept Reid wholeheartedly. In his early glory days, Elton, who’d always been a fan at heart, got a chance to meet such legendary stars of earlier generations as Mae West and Groucho Marx. In 1976, just before Elvis Presley died, John went backstage and saw the King in his dressing room — fat, disoriented, black hair dye running down his face, surrounded by Memphis mafia. It was a chilling vision and a warning.

John had always been a soccer fan, and his happiest moment came in 1973 when he took over as the director of the Watford Football Club (he became chairman in ’76). “I used to go to matches with my father,” John says. “In 1974 I had green hair and huge platform shoes, and the men probably laughed behind my back, but they were nice to my face. Everyone knew I was gay, anyway. People would chant, rather good-naturedly, ‘Don’t sit down while Elton’s around, or you’ll get a penis up your arse.’”

In fact, John came out as a bisexual in the pages of this magazine, in 1976, despite the warnings of John Reid (who was no longer his lover) and of his own mother. She also begged him to be less camp around the Watford team. Wasted words, since the widely reported revelations caused rival supporters to label the Watford players “poofters” and once to chant for 20 minutes, “Elton John’s a homosexual,” to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”

“Even so,” John tells me, “I had a lot of success as chairman. I hired a brilliant young man, Graham Taylor, as manager, and he brought us up from the fourth division to the first in just five years and qualified us for European competition. Quite a fairy tale. It was fun being a gay man and, as chairman of a football team, having the right to go into the changing rooms. Of course, it makes it easier if you’re an artist — that’s acceptable in England.”

After he broke up with John Reid, he began to slide into using drugs — especially marijuana and cocaine — and on tour he’d run through bag after bag in his hotel room, watching porno videos. “With coke you get rid of so many inhibitions,” John remarks, “but onstage, it’s no good for performing. You have a hundred thoughts in a minute, but other people can’t follow you. And then when I’d come down, I’d be a complete monster.”

Before 1976, John had produced enough hits to last a lifetime. In four years of feverish activity, he accumulated the musical capital that he has been able to draw on during his long career. But despite his artistic drive and repeated triumphs, he was beginning to take bigger and bigger risks with his talent, his mental health — and even his life. In November 1975, during Elton John Week in Los Angeles, he became violently depressed, even though he was singing to sold-out concerts at Dodger Stadium and living in the old David O. Selznick mansion, in Beverly Hills. In front of his relatives, he swallowed 60 Valiums. “I jumped into the pool in front of my mother and my 75-year-old grandmother, screaming, ‘I’m going to die!’ I always remember that as they pulled me out, I heard my gran say, ‘I suppose we’ve all got to go home now.’”

In the recent tell-all documentary Elton John: Tantrums and Tiaras, John’s mother began to weep while recalling those difficult days. He was addicted to cocaine for 20 years and at one point even started to have seizures.

He could still compose as effortlessly as ever, but as his mood darkened, his sound became relentlessly vanilla and his costumes more and more outrageous, as if to conceal the inner dread. He pranced around the stage in a duck suit or a Tina Turner gown or an Ali Baba turban or a Mozart wig and a beauty spot. He launched himself into many high-profile activities. He became friendly with members of the royal family. He breached the Iron Curtain to become the first pop star of the West to be invited to the Soviet Union. He toured China as well and came to seem as much as an ambassador as a performer.

And he got married to his tape operator, a German woman in her late 20s named Renate Blauel. When I ask him if he married to quiet rumors, he points out that he’d already come out as a bisexual seven years earlier. “No, I got married because I was desperately unhappy,” John says. “I thought my life would change. And we did have some great times together, and our sex life was good, but I was just fooling myself. It’s impossible to have a good relationship when you’re a drug addict.” During the next three years, Renate appeared less and less frequently in public, and before long the divorce was announced. Although the separation was amicable and dignified, John still has the nagging feeling that the one person in his life to whom he has not made amends, AA style, is Renate.

A sign that there was still plenty of fight left in John, however, came in 1988, when he sued England’s mudslinging tabloid paper The Sun, which the year before had launched a smear campaign against the singer. Although the battle got bloody, he stuck to his guns, won an out-of-court settlement of $1.64 million (the largest libel settlement in British history) — and forced The Sun to print a banner headline retracting the paper’s allegations: SORRY ELTON.

In 1989, a young American lover of John’s, Hugh Williams, persuaded John to join him in detox. Every clinic turned John down because he was cross-addicted (sex, food, drugs, booze — and, of course, shopping!). Finally the Parkside Lutheran Hospital, in Chicago, took him on. Elton the Magnificent, who lives on $23 million a year, was reduced to sleeping on an Army-style cot, sharing a room and washing his own clothes. “They pointed out that I couldn’t do anything for myself, such as drive or shop for food,” John says. “Suddenly, during drug treatment, I was on my own. I had to become self-sufficient.”

NOW EVERYTHING IS LOOKING UP. John met the love of his life, Canadian-born David Furnish, on Oct. 30, 1993; John is clean and sober; and he’s put out his best album in years, Made in England. John publicly announced the relationship at the Oscars in 1995, when he and lyricist Tim Rice received an Academy Award for the song “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” from Disney’s The Lion King. John kissed Furnish and then, from the stage, thanked his lover for all of his support.

Somewhat worryingly, John no longer attends AA meetings. “I went for three years,” he says, “but I was beginning to bore myself. I did everything I was told to do in AA, and everything worked, but then I wanted to get back to having a life. I never go to discos now. I’d feel like the queen mother if I went, I’m so old. I’d rather go to an antique show or read a book. And I love to have friends come stay for the weekend.”

Furnish, who is 34, was a highly paid executive at the London office of the advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather when he met John. So many of John’s friends had died of AIDS or moved away that he no longer knew many people in London; he asked a friend to invite a few amusing guys to dinner, and among them was Furnish. The very next night they had a date and ordered in a Chinese meal.

At first, Furnish, who quit his job after a year in order to spend more time with John, was a bit lost. “He was used to driving to work and having an identity of his own,” John says. “Suddenly he had too much time on his hands and felt like an accessory. But he’d always wanted to make movies — and after a couple of 16 mm shorts, his very first documentary was Tantrums and Tiaras. My management didn’t want him to do the documentary — they were afraid it would be damaging, and when they saw it, they had lots of trouble with it. It is outrageous, but I’m so fed up with a documentary in which everyone comes out as sweetness and light. I want one where people will say, ‘She was an absolute cow.‘ I have to be honest now.”

In the film, John blows up when a flunky arrives late with outfits for his new video. In another scene, he hyper-spaces into a terminal funk when a fan begins to wave, throwing off his tennis game. During the course of the documentary, which spans a year, he admits that traveling with hundreds of items of clothing is “obscene,” but, he says, “I find it comforting.”

Probably the most poignant moment in the film occurs when the couple are at a luxurious hotel near Nice, France, and Furnish asks John if he would consider going away without his driver, valet and tennis coach. “Probably, but … no, I wouldn’t enjoy it very much.” When Furnish asks him if he would consider lying by the pool or water-skiing or driving through the country or taking a moonlight walk, John replies that he might consider the walk, “but the other three are absolute no-nos.” Later, when Furnish, behind the camera, asks John how he could get more balance into his life, the singer appears cornered, slightly frustrated, and then looks straight at him and whispers gently, “Shhh.”

John is as busy as ever. He’s still a shopping addict and is always buying new treasures for his four residences — he has homes in London and Nice in addition to the ones he keeps in Windsor and Atlanta, to which he was drawn by an ex-lover and friend. “I love Atlanta; people leave me alone,” he says. “I guess it’s out of Southern politeness. I drive around and shop just like a regular person. I have normal friends — no one in show business. All my friends have normal jobs. When I’m on tour in America or Canada, I can always fly home to Atlanta and sleep in my own bed. I started off with just one apartment in Atlanta, but now I have five that I ran together so that I have 18,000 square feet altogether, in which I can display my huge collections of black-and-white photos, mostly vintage. Atlanta has great galleries, it’s civilized, and, of course, it’s a very gay city. I’ve never felt any animosity against me as a gay man in the States, although I know parts of the religious right have boycotted Disney because of me.”

He has written three extra songs for The Lion King, which will be produced onstage at the new Disney theater in New York. Disney was so pleased by the success of the film, John says, that it offered to let him do another animated picture, which he turned down. “I said, ‘Give me something more dangerous,’” he says. “And they said, ‘OK, how about Aida for the stage?’ Tim Rice and I wrote it in 19 days; we did a song a day — it just poured out. Our story is modern and starts not in Egypt but in Nubia; we can’t compete with Verdi.”

With Tim Rice, John is also preparing an animated movie for DreamWorks, to be called Eldorado, City of Gold. And not long ago he wrote with Taupin and recorded with Luciano Pavarotti a single to benefit John’s AIDS Foundation and War Child, an organization helping Bosnia’s war orphans that was chosen by Pavarotti. The song is called “Live Like Horses,” but when John looked at the cover photo of Pavarotti and himself, he murmured, “Eat like horses.” John played it for me at top volume and sang along, both parts, eyes closed and face turned in profile.

In America, John has been responsible for raising $9 million — and another $20 million in matching funds — and in Britain for some $4 million. From the beginning, John decided that he wanted to give money for direct care, not for research. “I wanted to make a difference to people who were really sick,” he says. “The National AIDS Fund in Washington helped us locate the right organizations to finance. Raising money is no problem, but giving it away to the right people is trickier. Eighty-six percent of what we raise gets out to the ill in the States; in England our administrative costs are even lower, and 93 percent gets out. We pay for meals, counseling, shelter, education for gays and lesbians, for Hispanics — every minority; we cover the whole board. Of course, with the new treatments, things are changing. Soon, in the States, we won’t need to fund meals so much as to pay for the protease inhibitors themselves, which can cost up to $14,000 a year.”

Considering how promiscuous John was in the ’80s, it’s a miracle that he’s HIV negative, and he’s the first to recognize his good luck. And even after six years of sobriety, he recognizes how precarious it is. “I love promiscuity — but why should I sabotage my life?” he asks. “Every performer has that self-destruct element somewhere inside. I’d love to have a glass of red wine, but why should I destroy my whole life just for that? My career is still there; I have a great art collection, a fabulous relationship. But if I were to go and fuck one boy and take one line of coke or one drink, my whole life would be in ruins.” He gives a little smile. “I know I sound like Thoroughly Modern Millie.”