Me Elton John

by Elton John

  And that was the thing about my interactions with the Royal Family. I always found them incredibly charming and funny people. I know the Queen’s public image isn’t exactly one of wild frivolity, but I think that’s more to do with the nature of her job. I noticed it when I got the CBE, and then the knighthood. She has to spend two and a half hours handing the things out, making small talk with two hundred people, one after the other. Anyone would be hard pressed to come up with a string of brilliant witticisms in that position. She just asks you if you’re busy at the moment, you say ‘yes, Ma’am’, she says ‘how lovely’ and moves on. But in private she could be hilarious. At another party, I saw her approach Viscount Linley and ask him to look in on his sister, who’d been taken ill and retired to her room. When he repeatedly tried to fob her off, the Queen lightly slapped him across the face, saying ‘Don’t’ – SLAP – ‘argue’ – SLAP – ‘with’ – SLAP – ‘me’ – SLAP – ‘I’ – SLAP – ‘am’ – SLAP – ‘THE QUEEN!’ That seemed to do the trick. As he left, she saw me staring at her, gave me a wink and walked off.

  Yet no matter how funny or normal the Royal Family seemed, whether they were complaining about the paint job on my Aston Martin, or asking me if I’d done any coke before I went onstage, or winking at me after slapping their nephew across the face, there would inevitably come a moment where I’d find myself feeling slightly out of place, thinking: ‘This is just bizarre. I’m a musician from a council house on Pinner Road – what am I doing here?’ But with Diana it wasn’t like that. Despite her status and background, she was blessed with an incredible social ease, an ability to talk to anybody, to make herself seem ordinary, to make people feel totally comfortable in her company. Her kids have inherited it, Prince Harry in particular; he’s exactly the same as his mum, completely without any interest in formality or grandeur. That famous photo of her holding an AIDS patient’s hand at the London Middlesex Hospital – that was Diana. I don’t think she was necessarily trying to make a big point, although obviously she did: in that moment, she changed public attitudes to AIDS forever. She just met someone suffering, dying in agony: why wouldn’t you reach out and touch them? It’s the natural human impulse, to try and comfort someone.

  That night in 1981, she arrived in the ballroom and we immediately clicked. We ended up pretending to dance the Charleston while hooting at the disco’s feebleness. She was fabulous company, the best dinner party guest, incredibly indiscreet, a real gossip: you could ask her anything and she’d tell you. The only peculiar thing about her was the way she talked about Prince Charles. She never mentioned him by name; it was always ‘my husband’, never Charles, certainly never an affectionate nickname. It seemed very distant, cold and formal, which was very strange, because the one thing Diana wasn’t was formal: she was always incredulous at how starchy and proper some other members of the Royal Family could be.

  But if I was bowled over by Diana, it was nothing compared to the impact she could have on straight men. They seemed to completely lose their minds in her presence: they were just utterly bewitched. When I was making The Lion King, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney, came over to England, and we threw a dinner party for him and his wife Marilyn at Woodside. I asked them if there was anyone in Britain they really wanted to meet and, straight away, they said ‘Princess Diana’. So we invited her, and George Michael, Richard Curtis and his wife Emma Freud, Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone, all of whom were in the country at the time. The most peculiar scene developed. Straight away, Richard Gere and Diana seemed very taken with each other. She was separated from Prince Charles by this point, and Richard had just broken up with Cindy Crawford, and they ended up sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace together, locked in rapt conversation. As the rest of us chatted, I couldn’t help notice a slightly strange atmosphere in the room. Judging by the kind of looks he kept shooting them, the sight of Diana and Richard Gere’s newly blossoming friendship was not going down very well with Sylvester Stallone at all. I think he might have turned up to the party with the express intention of picking Diana up, only to find his plans for the evening unexpectedly ruined.

  Eventually, dinner was served. We moved into the dining room and seated ourselves at the table. Or at least, most of us did. There was no sign of Richard Gere, or indeed Sylvester Stallone. We waited. Still no sign. Finally, I asked David to go and find them. He came back with both of them, but he was wearing a fairly ashen expression.

  ‘Elton,’ he mumbled. ‘We have … a situation.’

  It transpired that when David had gone out to find them, he’d discovered Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere in the corridor, squaring up to each other, apparently about to settle their differences over Diana by having a fistfight. He’d managed to calm things down by pretending he hadn’t noticed what was going on – ‘Hey, guys! Time for dinner!’ – but Sylvester clearly still wasn’t happy. After dinner, Diana and Richard Gere resumed their position together in front of the fire, and Sylvester eventually stormed off home.

  ‘I never would have come,’ he snapped, as David and I showed him to the door, ‘if I’d known Prince fuckin’ Charming was gonna be here.’ Then he added: ‘If I’d wanted her, I would’ve taken her!’

  We managed to wait until his car was out of sight before we started laughing. Back in the living room, Diana and Richard Gere were still gazing raptly at each other. She seemed completely unruffled. Maybe she hadn’t realized what was happening. Or maybe stuff like that happened all the time and she was used to it. After she died, people started talking about something called the Diana Effect, meaning the way she managed to change the public’s attitudes to the Royal Family, or to AIDS or bulimia or mental health. But every time I heard the phrase, I thought about that night. There was definitely another kind of Diana Effect: one that could bring Hollywood superstars to the verge of a punch-up over her attentions at a dinner party, like a couple of love-struck teenage idiots.

  She was a very dear friend for years, and then, completely unexpectedly, we fell out. The cause was a book Gianni Versace put together called Rock and Royalty. It was a collection of portraits by great photographers: Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Herb Ritts, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe. The proceeds were going to the AIDS Foundation, and she agreed to write the foreword. Then she got cold feet. I think Buckingham Palace didn’t like the idea of a member of the Royal Family having anything to do with a book that featured shots of naked guys with towels draped around them. So, at the last moment, Diana withdrew her foreword. She said she had no idea of the book’s contents, which just wasn’t true: Gianni had shown her the whole thing and she had said she loved it. I wrote back to her, calling her out, telling her how much money she had cost the AIDS Foundation, reminding her that she had seen the book. The letter I got back was very formal and severe: ‘Dear Mr John…’ And that seemed to be the end of that. I was angry with her, but I was also worried. She seemed to be losing touch with all sorts of really close friends, who would be honest with her and tell her the truth. She was surrounding herself instead with people who told her what she wanted to hear, or who would listen and nod when she came out with some of the more paranoid theories she’d developed about the Royal Family since her divorce. I knew from personal experience that wasn’t a healthy situation.

  I didn’t speak to her again until the day Gianni was murdered. She was the first person to call me after John Reid rang and told me he was dead. I don’t even know how she got hold of the number; we hadn’t had the house in Nice for long. She was just down the coast, in St-Tropez, on Dodi Fayed’s yacht. She asked how I was, if I’d spoken to Donatella. Then she said, ‘I’m so sorry. It was a silly falling-out. Let’s be friends.’

  She came with us to the funeral, looking incredible: tanned from her holiday, wearing a pearl necklace. She was the same warm, caring, tactile person she had always been. When she walked in, the paparazzi in the church went crazy: it was like the biggest star in the world had arrived, which I suppose she had.
They didn’t let up throughout the service, although I feel I should point out that the famous shot they got of her supposedly consoling me – where she’s leaning forward towards me, speaking, while I’m red-eyed and glazed with grief – is one moment in the service where she wasn’t doing anything of the sort. They snapped her just as she was leaning past me, reaching for a mint that David offered her. The warm words of comfort coming from her lips at that exact moment were actually, ‘God, I’d love a Polo.’

  I wrote to her afterwards, thanking her, and she wrote back offering to be a patron of the AIDS Foundation and asking if I would get involved in her landmine charity. We were going to meet up next time we were both in London to have lunch and discuss it. But there wasn’t a next time.

  * * *

  A couple of days after her death, I got a phone call from Richard Branson. He told me that when people signed the book of condolence at St James’s Palace, a lot of them were writing down quotations from the lyrics of ‘Candle In The Wind’. Apparently, they were playing it a lot on the radio in the UK as well – stations had changed from their usual musical format and were broadcasting sombre-sounding music to reflect the public mood. Then he asked if I would be prepared to rewrite the lyrics and sing it at the funeral. I hadn’t been expecting that at all. I think Richard had been contacted by the Spencer family, because they felt the funeral should be something that people would really connect to: they didn’t want a severe, remote royal event full of pageantry and protocol, because that wouldn’t have fitted Diana’s character at all.

  So I called Bernie. I thought it was an incredibly tough gig for him. Not only was whatever he wrote going to be broadcast live to literally billions of people – it was obvious that the funeral would be a huge, global, televised event – it had to be vetted by the Royal Family and the Church of England. But he was fantastic: he acted as if writing a song that the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury had to check through first was all in a day’s work. He faxed the lyrics over the next morning, I faxed them to Richard Branson and they were waved through.

  Even so, when I went to rehearse at Westminster Abbey the day before the funeral, I had no idea what to expect. The memory of Gianni’s memorial service, the fact that the church officials clearly hadn’t thought it appropriate for me to perform, played on my mind. And that was just singing a hymn at a private service, not performing a rock song at a state event. What if people didn’t really want me here either?

  But it couldn’t have been more different. The Archbishop of Canterbury was incredibly nice and hugely supportive. There was a real sense of camaraderie, that everyone had to pull together to make this thing work. I insisted on having a teleprompter by the piano, with Bernie’s new lyrics on it. Up until then, I had been against their use. Partly because it seemed antithetical to the spontaneous spirit of rock and roll – you know, I’m pretty sure Little Richard wasn’t reading the words off an autocue when he recorded ‘Long Tall Sally’ – and partly because I just thought: come on, do your job properly. You’ve really only got three things to do onstage – sing in tune, play the right notes and remember the words. If you can only be bothered to do two of them you may as well go and find another job instead – it’s why I have such a problem with artists miming onstage. But this time, I thought I could relax the rules slightly. It was a completely unique experience, a one-off. There was a sense in which it was the biggest gig of my life – for four minutes, I was literally going to be the centre of the world’s attention – but equally, it wasn’t an Elton John moment, it wasn’t about me at all. It was very strange.

  Just how strange was underlined when we arrived at Westminster Abbey the next day. David and I went with George Michael; this was long before we fell out over his drug problems. He had rung up and asked if we could go to the funeral together. On the car journey there, we just sat in silence: George was too upset to speak, there was no conversation, nothing. The place was full of people I knew: Donatella Versace was there, David Frost, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. It all felt slightly surreal, like a dream you were having rather than something that was actually happening in real life. We were seated in the inner sanctum of the church, right where the Royal Family came in. William and Harry looked completely shell-shocked. They were fifteen and twelve, and I thought the way they were treated that day was absolutely inhuman. They were forced to walk through the streets of London behind their mother’s coffin, told to show no emotion and look straight ahead. It was a horrendous way to treat two kids who’d just lost their mum.

  But I barely took any of it in. I wasn’t suffering from nerves, exactly. I’d be lying if I said the thought that two billion people were watching never crossed my mind, but at least I was performing in front of the part of the church where they had put all the representatives from the charities Diana supported, so there were friends from the Elton John AIDS Foundation there – Robert Key, Anne Aslett and James Locke. But it was less stage fright than a very specific fear: what if I went into autopilot and sang the wrong version? I’d performed ‘Candle In The Wind’ hundreds of times. It really wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that I might lose myself in the performance, forget about the teleprompter altogether and start singing the original lyrics. How bad could it be if I did that? Appalling. People might have been quoting lines from them in the book of condolence at St James’s Palace, but huge chunks of the lyrics were obviously completely inappropriate for the occasion. You’d have a hard time bluffing your way out of singing about Marilyn Monroe being found dead in the nude, or how your feelings were something more than sexual, at a state funeral, in front of a global audience of two billion people or whatever it was supposed to be.

  And then an odd thing happened. I found myself zoning out of the funeral and thinking about an incident from years before, on my first tour of America. I had been booked to appear on The Andy Williams Show with Mama Cass Elliot from The Mamas and The Papas and Ray Charles. When I arrived, the producers blithely informed me that we weren’t just going to be performing on the same show, we were going to be performing together. They seemed to think this was a wonderful surprise for me, that I was going to be delighted about it. They thought wrong: Mama Cass, fine, Andy Williams, fine, but Ray Charles? Are you joking? Ray Charles! Brother Ray! The Genius! An artist I’d spent hours fantasizing about being when I was a kid, hiding in my bedroom with my record collection, miming away to his Ray Charles at Newport live album. And now some idiot had decided that it was a marvellous idea for him to go on national TV and sing with me, as if a completely unknown English singer-songwriter was some kind of perfect musical counterpart for the man who’d basically single-handedly invented soul music. If it wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard, it sounded so much like it as to make no difference. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. My career was just beginning, it was my first appearance on US TV. I was in no position to start upsetting American television executives by being difficult. So I did it. I got up and sang ‘Heaven Help Us All’ with Ray Charles – him playing a white piano, me playing a black piano. It went perfectly. Ray Charles was gracious and kind and encouraging – ‘Hey, sweetheart, how you doin’?’ – as artists who don’t have anything to prove tend to be.

  And it really taught me something important. Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone. It’s like going deep inside yourself, forgetting about whatever emotions you may have and thinking: no, I’m a performer. This is what I do. Get on with it.

  So I got on with it. I don’t remember much about the performance itself, but I remember the applause afterwards. It seemed to start outside Westminster Abbey and sweep into the church itself, which I guess meant that Diana’s family had achieved their aim in getting me to sing: it connected with the people outside. After the funeral, I went straight to Townhouse Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, where George Martin was waiting: they were going to release the new version of ‘Candle I
n The Wind’ as a single to raise money for a charity memorial fund set up in Diana’s name. I sang it twice, live at the piano, and went home, leaving George Martin to overdub a string quartet on it. When I got back to Woodside, David was standing in the kitchen, watching the coverage on TV. The funeral cortège had got to the M1: people were throwing flowers at Diana’s hearse from the bridges over the motorway. That was when I finally broke down. I hadn’t felt able to show emotion all day. I had a job to do, and how I felt about Diana’s death might have interfered with my ability to do it; the funeral wasn’t about me, it was about her. So up until that point, I couldn’t afford to be upset.

  The response to the single was crazy. People were queuing up outside record stores, then rushing in and grabbing armfuls of CD singles and buying them. There were all these preposterous statistics about it. At one point, it was supposed to be selling six copies a second; it was the fastest-selling single ever released; it was the biggest-selling single of all time in Finland. I got sales awards for it from the most bizarre places: Indonesia, the Middle East. And it just went on and on and on. It was Number One in America for fourteen weeks. It was in the Top Twenty in Canada for three years. There was part of me that couldn’t understand it: why would anyone want to listen to it? Under what circumstances would you play it? I never did. I sang it three times – once at the funeral and twice in the studio – then I listened back to it once to OK the mix and that was it: never again. I suppose people were just buying it to give money to the charity, which was great, although a huge chunk of the £38 million it raised was ultimately wasted. The charity got involved in defending her image rights against people who were making Diana merchandise – plates and dolls and T-shirts – and the money started getting swallowed up by lawyers’ fees. It lost a case against an American company called Franklin Mint and ended up paying them millions, settling a case of malicious prosecution out of court. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, I felt it made them look bad, as if they were more interested in using the money raised to fight over trademarks than in clearing landmines or helping disadvantaged women, or all the other work they were doing.