Me Elton John

by Elton John

  Surrogacy involves a real leap of faith. Once you’ve selected your egg donor and left your sperm sample at the fertility clinic, your fate is entirely in the hands of others. We were incredibly lucky. We found an amazing doctor called Guy Ringler, a gay man who specializes in fertility for LGBT parents. And we found the most remarkable surrogate. She lived north of San Francisco and had been a surrogate before. She was completely uninterested in celebrity or money: all she cared about was helping loving couples to have children. She worked out who Edward and James really were about three months into her pregnancy and she didn’t bat an eyelid. David drove up to meet her, outside of her hometown in case he was recognized. It was when he came back, gushing about how incredible she was, that everything suddenly became very real. I didn’t feel any trepidation or doubt about our decision; no panic, no ‘what have we done?’ – just excitement and anticipation.

  The rest of the pregnancy passed in a blur. The baby was due on 21 December 2010. We became very close to the surrogate, her boyfriend and her family. The more I got to know them, the more I started to hate the phrase ‘transactional surrogacy’. It sounded so clinical and mercenary, and there was nothing clinical or mercenary about these people at all: they were kind and loving and genuinely delighted to be helping us achieve a dream. We arranged to hire a nanny, the same one who had looked after our friend Elizabeth Hurley’s son. We knew her because Liz had stayed at Woodside after she had given birth to keep out of the media’s glare. We began creating a nursery at our apartment in LA, but it all had to be done under the veil of secrecy: everything we bought was sent to our office in LA, taken out of its packaging and wrapped so it looked like a Christmas present for David or me when it arrived at our home.

  When the due date drew close, the surrogate and her family moved to a hotel in LA. Ingrid and Sandy, who we had asked to be godparents, flew in for the birth. We had planned to make a surprise announcement that we had become a family at a Christmas lunch for our friends in LA, but we had to keep putting the lunch off because the baby was late. Eventually, the surrogate got sick of sleepless nights, back pain and swollen ankles and took decisive action. There was a restaurant in LA, on Coldwater Canyon, that served a watercress soup reputed to induce labour. The reputation was obviously fully deserved: we got a phone call on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, telling us to rush to the Cedars-Sinai hospital.

  Still concerned about the veil of secrecy, I arrived in disguise, dressed down and wearing a cap. As it turned out, I could have arrived at the hospital in the four-foot-high Doc Martens I wore in Tommy and my old glasses that lit up in the shape of the word ELTON and no one would have noticed, because no one was there. The place was absolutely deserted. The maternity ward looked like the hotel in The Shining. We learned that no one wants to have a baby at Christmas: they either induce or have caesareans to avoid being in hospital over the holidays. No one, that is, except us. We had deliberately tried to time the birth so that it would happen when I wasn’t working or away on tour. So there wasn’t a soul around, except for us and one other woman in the room next door, an Australian who had twins. And our son, who arrived at two thirty in the morning on Christmas Day.

  I cut the umbilical cord – I’m normally incredibly squeamish, but the emotion of what had happened completely took over. We took our shirts off so the baby would have skin-to-skin contact. We called him Zachary Jackson Levon. Everybody always assumes the last name came from the song Bernie and I wrote on Madman Across the Water, but they’re wrong: he’s named after Lev. He had to be. Lev was like an angel, a messenger, who taught me something about myself that I didn’t really understand. Lev was the reason we were there, on a maternity ward, holding our son, knowing that our lives had just completely changed forever.

  * * *

  As well as Ingrid and Sandy, we asked Lady Gaga to be Zachary’s godmother. I had started collaborating with a lot of younger artists, everyone from the Scissor Sisters to Kanye West. It was always incredibly flattering to be asked to work with people who weren’t even born when my career took off, but of all the young artists I collaborated with, I had a special bond with Gaga. I loved her from the moment I clapped eyes on her: the music she made, the outrageous clothes, the sense of theatre and spectacle. We were very different people – she was a young woman from New York, barely into her twenties – but as soon as we met, it was obvious we were cut from exactly the same cloth: I called her the Bastard Daughter of Elton John. I loved her so much, I got myself into yet more trouble with the press. I’d always got on fine with Madonna. I used to make fun of her for lip-synching onstage, but the problem really started when she ran Gaga down on an American chat show. I got that Gaga’s single ‘Born This Way’ definitely sounded similar to ‘Express Yourself’, but I couldn’t see why she was so ungracious and nasty about it, rather than taking it as a compliment when a new generation of artists was influenced by her, particularly when she claims to be a champion for women. I think it’s just wrong – an established artist shouldn’t kick down a younger artist right at the start of their career. I was furious and I said some pretty horrible things about her to a TV interviewer in Australia, a guy I’d known since the seventies called Molly Meldrum. You can tell from the footage that it wasn’t part of the interview, that I was just sounding off to an old friend between takes – you can hear people moving cameras around to set up the next shot while we’re talking – but they broadcast it anyway, which brought that particular old friendship to a very swift conclusion. Still, I shouldn’t have said it. I apologized afterwards when I bumped into her in a restaurant in France and she was very gracious about it. Gaga turned out to be a great godmother: she would turn up backstage and insist on giving Zachary his bath while dressed in full Gaga regalia, which was quite an incredible sight.

  In fact, everything about fatherhood is incredible. I haven’t got any great insights into being a father that you haven’t already heard a hundred times before. All those clichés about it grounding you, changing the way you look at the world, experiencing a love unlike any other love you’ve felt in your life, how awe-inspiring it is to see a person forming in front of your eyes – all are true. But perhaps I felt all those things more keenly because I never thought I would be a father until quite late on in my life. If you had tried to tell the Elton John of the seventies or eighties that he could find more fulfilment on a deep and profound level in changing a nappy than in writing a song or playing a gig, you would probably have had to exit the room at high speed immediately afterwards, with hurled crockery flying past your ears. And yet it was true: the responsibility was huge, but there is nothing about being a father that I don’t love. I even found the toddler tantrums weirdly charming. You think you’re being difficult, my little sausage? Have I ever told you about the time I drank eight vodka martinis, took all my clothes off in front of a film crew and then broke my manager’s nose?

  We knew we wanted another child almost straight away. It was largely because we loved being parents so much, but there was more to it than that. However normal we tried to make our child’s life, the fact is that it was never going to be entirely normal, because of what one of his parents did for a living and everything that comes attached. Because, before he started school, Zachary always came with me on tour; he had been around the world twice by the time he was four years old. He’d been bathed by Lady Gaga and jigged up and down on Eminem’s knee. He’d stood in the wings of shows at Las Vegas and had his photograph taken by paparazzi, which, to my delight, he endured rather than enjoyed: a chip off the old block, there. These are not the normal experiences of a toddler. There’s obviously a degree of privilege that goes with being Elton John’s son, but you would be fooling yourself if you didn’t think there was also a degree of burden. I had hated being an only child, and it seemed right that he should have a sibling who he could share with, who would understand his experience of life. We used the same surrogate, same agencies, same egg donor and everything fell perfectly into place again:
Elijah was born on 11 January 2013.

  The only person who didn’t seem delighted for us was my mother. My relationship with her had always been tough going, but it never really recovered after our civil partnership ceremony in 2005. As usual, things got smoothed over as best I could, but something about her had definitely changed, or at least been amplified. The drizzle of criticism turned into a constant downpour. She seemed to go out of her way to tell me how much she hated what I was doing. If I made a new album, it was a load of rubbish: why didn’t I try to be more like Robbie Williams? Couldn’t I write songs like that anymore? If I bought a new painting, it was bleedin’ ugly and she could have painted something better herself. If I played a charity gig, it was the most boring thing she’d ever sat through in her life, the evening only saved from complete disaster by someone else’s performance, which had stolen the show. If the AIDS Foundation held a glittering fundraising dinner packed with stars, it was evidence that I was only interested in fame and kissing celebrities’ arses.

  For variety, she threw in the occasional thunderclap of real anger. I never knew when they were coming or what was going to provoke them. Spending time with her was like inviting an unexploded bomb to lunch or on holiday with you: I was always on edge, wondering what was going to set her off. Once it was the fact that I’d bought a kennel for the dogs we kept at the house in Nice. Once it was Billy Elliot, apparently the only thing I’d done in about ten years that she thought was any good. The musical had really taken off in a way that no one involved in it had predicted, not just in the UK but in countries where people had barely heard of the Miners’ Strike or the impact of Thatcherism on the British manufacturing industry: the story at its heart turned out to be universal. Mum went to see it in London dozens of times, until one afternoon, when the box office misplaced her tickets for the matinee and took five minutes to find them, something she decided I had deliberately, meticulously planned in an attempt to humiliate her. Luckily, I followed Billy Elliot up with The Vampire Lestat, a musical Bernie and I wrote together, which bombed – everything went wrong, from the timing, to the staging, to the dialogue – and normal service was resumed: it provided my mother with the unmissable opportunity to inform me that she had known from the start it would be a terrible flop.

  I still tried to laugh it all off, or ignore it, but it wasn’t that easy. If she wanted a row, Mum always knew which buttons to press, because she had installed the buttons in the first place. She still had the ability to make me feel as if I were a terrified ten-year-old back in Pinner, like everything was my fault: I was constantly in fear, metaphorically speaking, of getting a smack. The result was exactly what you would expect: I started to actively avoid her. On my sixtieth birthday, I had a huge party in New York at St John the Divine, the same cathedral where I later saw Aretha Franklin sing for the last time. Mum had been one of the guests of honour at my fiftieth, the famous fancy dress party where she and Derf came as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and I wore a Louis XVI costume with a train held by two men dressed as Cupid and a wig so huge I had to travel there in the back of a furniture van. I had ample time to reconsider the wisdom of this idea when the furniture van got stuck in a traffic jam for an hour and a half. This time, I decided not to invite her. I knew she would come and pour cold water on the whole event; she wouldn’t enjoy herself and nor would I. I made an excuse about it being too far for her to travel – she hadn’t been well – but the truth was, I just didn’t want her there.

  By the time Zachary was born, we weren’t speaking at all. Mum had moved beyond just constantly criticizing, into going out of her way to try and be hurtful. She had delighted in telling me she was still friends with John Reid after our business relationship collapsed: ‘I don’t know what you’re upset about,’ she snapped, when I pointed out that this seemed a bit disloyal. ‘It’s only money.’ That was certainly one way of describing what had happened. But the final row came when my PA, Bob Halley, left. We’d been together since the seventies but the relationship had become strained. Bob enjoyed a very lavish lifestyle by proxy, and he didn’t like it at all when the management tried to rein in spending, to make my tours more cost-efficient: it’s strange sometimes how fame affects the people around you more than it affects you. The flashpoint was an argument over which car service we should use. The management had brought in a more competitive company. Bob had got rid of them and employed a more expensive one. The management office overruled him and reinstated their choice of car service. Bob was furious. We had a big argument about it in the St. Regis hotel in New York. He said he’d been undermined, his authority had been challenged. I said we were just trying to save money. He told me he was going to leave and I lost my temper and told him that was fine with me. Later, after I had calmed down, I went back to speak to him again. This time he told me that he hated everyone at the Rocket office: apparently my entire management team were in his bad books. I didn’t really know what to say to that: your entire team or your PA? It’s not exactly the toughest choice in the world. Bob announced that he was quitting his job and stormed out, adding, as he left, that my career would be over in six months without him. Whatever Bob’s talents were, clairvoyance was clearly not among them. The only change in my career after he quit was that the bills for touring expenses got noticeably smaller.

  My mum was absolutely livid when she heard Bob had left – they had always got on well. She didn’t want to hear my version of events, and told me that Bob had been more of a son to her than I had ever been.

  ‘You care more about that fucking thing you married than your own mother,’ she spat.

  * * *

  We didn’t speak again for seven years after that phone call. There comes a point where you realize you’re just banging your head against a brick wall: no matter how many times you do it, you’re never going to break through, you’re just going to end up with a constant headache. I still made sure she was looked after financially. When she said she wanted to move to Worthing, I bought her a new house. I paid for everything; made sure she had the best care when she needed a hip operation. She auctioned every gift I’d ever given her – everything from jewellery to platinum discs I’d had specially inscribed with her name – but she didn’t need money. She told the papers she was downsizing, but it was just another way of telling me to fuck off – like hiring an Elton John tribute act for her ninetieth birthday party. I ended up buying back some of the jewellery myself, stuff that had sentimental value to me, even if it no longer had for Mum.

  It was sad, but I didn’t want her in my life anymore. I didn’t invite her to the ceremony when the law around gay partnerships changed again and David and I got married in December 2014. It was a much smaller, more private event than the civil partnership. We went to the registry office in Maidenhead alone, then the registrar came back to Woodside and performed the ceremony there. The boys were ring-bearers: we tied the same gold bands we had used in the civil partnership – the ones we had bought in Paris years before – to a couple of toy rabbits with ribbon, and Zachary and Elijah carried them in.

  I would say Mum missed out on her grandsons growing up – my auntie Win and my cousins flocked around, the way normal families do when there are babies and toddlers to be fussed over and played with and treated – but honestly, she didn’t care. When Zachary was born, a tabloid journalist doorstepped her and asked her how she felt about not seeing her first grandchild, looking for a scoop about the callously abandoned grandmother. He didn’t get it. She told him she wasn’t bothered, and that she didn’t like, and had never liked, children. I laughed when I read it: no points for winning yourself sympathy, Mum, but ten out of ten for honesty.

  I got back into contact with her when I found out she was seriously ill. I sent her an email with some photos of the kids attached. She barely acknowledged them: ‘You’ve got your hands full’ was the only mention of them in her reply. I invited her to lunch. Nothing much had changed. She walked into Woodside and the first thing she said was, ‘
I’d forgotten how small this place is.’ But I was determined not to answer back, not to rise to the bait. The kids were home, playing together upstairs, and I asked if she wanted to see them; my mum said no. I told her that I didn’t want to talk about John Reid, or Bob Halley, that I just wanted to tell her after all we’d been through that I loved her.

  ‘I love you too,’ she said. ‘But I don’t like you at all.’

  Oh well – at least things stayed cordial otherwise. We would talk on the phone occasionally. I never asked her what she thought of anything I had done, and if I mentioned the kids she always changed the subject. I managed to get her and Auntie Win talking again – they had fallen out when Derf died in 2010 and Mum had refused to let Win’s son Paul come to the funeral, telling her that ‘Fred never liked him’ – so that was something. No luck building bridges between her and Uncle Reg, though. I can’t even remember what that argument had been about, but they still weren’t talking when she died in December 2017.

  I was incredibly upset when Mum died. I had gone down to Worthing to see her the week before – I knew she was terminally ill, but she hadn’t seemed like someone who was at death’s door that afternoon. It was an odd meeting: when I knocked on the door of her house, Bob Halley answered. We said hello and shook hands, which seemed to be the highlight of the afternoon as far as Mum was concerned.