Me

by Elton John

  For all its success, the tour had felt very familiar: the stadiums, the Starship, the celebrities, even the set we played. We had a new album recorded, a double called Blue Moves, but it wasn’t due out until the autumn, and I’d learned my lesson about inflicting new material on an unsuspecting audience at Wembley the year before. Especially if the material was like the stuff on Blue Moves. I’m very proud of it, but the music was complex and hard to play, quite experimental and jazz-influenced. And its mood was very sombre and reflective: Bernie pouring his heart out about his divorce from Maxine and me writing music to match. I even wrote some lyrics myself, the opening lines of ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’, the fallout from another disastrous infatuation with a straight guy: ‘What can I do to make you love me? What can I do to make you care?’ It’s a great album, but it’s not exactly the work of two people who are cartwheeling down the street, overflowing with the joys of life.

  And that was the real problem with the tour. The holiday in Barbados had been great, but it seemed like a distant memory. I was back in exactly the same place emotionally as I had been when I threw myself into the swimming pool in LA. My mum and Derf had found me a new home, called Woodside. It certainly sounded nice – a huge mock-Georgian house in Old Windsor, with thirty-seven acres of land – but I couldn’t tell you for sure how nice it was, because I had hardly been there since I moved in. I’d had enough time to ask Derf to build some shelves for my record collection, and to install a small menagerie of pets: a rabbit called Clarence, a cockatoo called Ollie and Roger, a mynah bird that someone had taught to say ‘piss off’, a phrase he later disgraced himself by using in front of Princess Margaret when I invited her for lunch. But no sooner had Roger arrived and told everyone present to piss off than I took his advice: there were always recording sessions to do, tours to go on.

  I still loved playing live, but I was physically spent. I’d started having seizures, almost like epileptic fits; not often, but often enough to scare me. I’d had a brain scan, but the neurologist I saw couldn’t find anything wrong with me, although I’m sure if I’d told him what was going up my nose on a regular basis, he could have made an accurate diagnosis on the spot. Bernie didn’t look in much better shape than me. Since his divorce, the only time you saw him without a beer in his hand was when he put it down to do a line of coke. I started suggesting to him that he try writing with other people as well as me – not that there was anything wrong with our relationship, either professionally or personally, but maybe a change of scenery would do us both good.

  Everything came to a head on the penultimate night of the Madison Square Garden residency. Backstage, I told the band that I couldn’t do it anymore. They could have another year’s wages as severance pay, but there would be no more tours for the foreseeable future. Towards the end of the show, I mumbled something non-committal about going away for a while. The minute I said it, I couldn’t work out whether I really meant it or not. On the one hand, I clearly couldn’t carry on like this, schlepping around the world. I’d convinced myself it was the root of all my problems. It was why I was so knackered, it was why my relationships never worked out, it was why I was unhappy. On the other, I still loved playing live. And I had been on the road since I was eighteen. It was my job. I didn’t really know adult life without it. What was I going to do all day? Watch Derf put shelves up and listen to a mynah bird telling me to piss off every ten minutes?

  So I was in a thoughtful mood when the journalist from Rolling Stone arrived at my hotel. He was called Cliff Jahr and he’d been pestering for an interview for weeks. I had no idea that Cliff was an out-and-proud gay man who’d turned up determined to find out the truth about my sexuality. I don’t think he saw it as a political thing – outing people wasn’t really viewed as striking a blow against a repressive society back then. I think he was just a hungry freelancer after a scoop.

  I later learned that Cliff had an elaborate plan to wheedle the information out of me. It involved a secret code word that he was going to drop into the conversation as a signal for the photographer to leave the room, at which point he would deploy his journalist’s guile to get me to confess my darkest secret to him. Bless him, he didn’t get the chance to put his meticulous plan into action. I brought the subject up before he did. He asked me if I was in love with anyone, which was very much the wrong question to ask me in those days, unless you had a few hours to spare and a burning desire to fill them listening to me moaning about the terrible state of my personal life. I started telling him how desperate I was to find someone to love. I despairingly wondered aloud if relationships with women might not be longer-lasting than the relationships I’d had with men. He looked a little taken aback and – to his immense credit – asked if I wanted him to turn his tape recorder off and speak off the record. I said no. Fuck it. It honestly didn’t seem like that big an issue. Everyone around me had accepted I was gay years before. Everyone in the music business knew about my relationship with John Reid. And it really can’t have been that much of a shock for Cliff Jahr, given that I’d previously told him the story of Divine and me being turned away from Crisco Disco. Let’s look at the circumstantial evidence: I’d been trying to get into a gay club, named after a famous anal lubricant, with the world’s most famous drag queen. The news that I wasn’t heterosexual could hardly have come as a bolt from the blue.

  He asked me if I was bisexual and I said yes. You can see that as fudging the issue if you want, but in fairness I’d had a relationship with a woman before, and I had a relationship with a woman afterwards. He asked if Bernie and I were ever a couple and I told him we weren’t. John Reid’s name came up and I fibbed and said I’d never had a serious affair with anyone. It certainly wasn’t my business to start outing anyone in Rolling Stone. I told him I thought everyone should be able to go to bed with whoever they wanted. ‘But they should draw the line at goats,’ I added.

  At that moment, John Reid suddenly stuck his head round the door and asked if everything was all right. I don’t know whether it was just perfect timing, or whether he’d been listening at the door in a state of mounting panic and finally, when I started making jokes about bestiality, couldn’t stand it any longer. Perhaps he drew the line at goats, too. I told John everything was fine. And I meant it. I didn’t feel relieved, or nervous, or proud, or any of the things you might expect to feel when you publicly come out. I didn’t feel anything really. I’d done all the fretting I had to do about my sexuality and what people might think about it years ago. I didn’t care.

  This was not an attitude that was shared by those around me. Not that anyone said anything directly to me. Respectful of the amount of money I was earning everyone, and wary of encouraging our old friend the Dwight Family Temper to put in one of its show-stopping guest appearances, they wouldn’t have dared. But around the time the feature came out, I got the feeling that John Reid and my American record company were in a state of anxiety, waiting to see what disastrous impact its revelations were going to have on my career.

  Eventually, the dust settled and the full, staggering extent of the damage I had caused became clear. There wasn’t any. A couple of nutcases wrote into Rolling Stone and said they were praying that my perverted soul be spared God’s wrath and eternal damnation. A few radio stations in the US announced they weren’t going to play my records anymore, but that didn’t bother me in the slightest: at the risk of sounding arrogant, I strongly suspected my career would limp on somehow without their help. People have said the Rolling Stone piece caused a dip in my record sales in the States, but my album sales had started to dip long before then. Rock of the Westies may have got to Number One, but it had sold far less than Captain Fantastic.

  In Britain, meanwhile, the Sun cancelled a competition to win copies of Blue Moves, on the grounds that its cover – a beautiful Patrick Procktor painting I owned of people sitting in a park – didn’t feature any women, and thus, presumably, constituted terrifying homosexual propaganda from which the pu
blic must be protected. Their logic seemed to be that if a Sun reader saw a painting of some men sitting in a park, they might immediately rip off their wedding ring, abandon their wife and children and race to the nearest gay bar singing ‘I Am What I Am’ as they went. But that was about it as far as adverse reactions went.

  * * *

  Actually, the British press seemed less interested in what was happening in my sex life than what was happening on top of my head. In one sense, I couldn’t blame them: I’d been pretty gripped by what was going on up there myself for the last year or so. My hair had started thinning a little in the early seventies, but a bad dye job in New York had suddenly caused the stuff to stage a mass walkout. Impressed by the way the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes seemed to change her hair colour to match her outfits, I had been getting mine dyed every shade imaginable at a salon in London for years with no apparent ill-effects. I’ve no idea what the New York hairdresser had put on it but, not long afterwards, it started coming out in chunks. By the time of the 1976 tour, there was virtually nothing left on top.

  I hated how I looked. Some people are blessed with the kind of face that looks good with a bald head. I am not one of those people. Without hair, I bear a disturbing resemblance to the cartoon character Shrek. But salvation was apparently at hand. I was directed to a man called Pierre Putot in Paris, who was supposedly a great pioneer in the art of hair transplants. At that point in history, hair transplants were so new that any doctor who could be bothered to do them counted as a great pioneer, but I was assured he was the best. Undergo a simple procedure, I was told, and I would leave his Paris clinic a changed man, to cries of incroyable! and sacre bleu! from onlookers dazzled by my new, leonine coiffure.

  It didn’t quite work out like that. For one thing, it wasn’t a simple procedure at all. It went on for five hours. I had it done twice, and both times it hurt like hell. The technique they used had the unappetizing name of ‘strip harvesting’: they took strips of hair from the back of my head with a scalpel and attached them to the crown. The sound of the hair being removed was disconcertingly like a rabbit gnawing its way through a carrot. I left the clinic after the first procedure reeling in agony, lost my footing as I tried to get into the back of a waiting car and hit the top of my head on the door frame. It was at that moment I discovered that however much a hair transplant hurt, it was a mere pinprick compared to the sensation of hitting your head on a car door immediately after having a hair transplant. Frantically dabbing my now-bleeding scalp with a tissue, I did the one thing I could think of that might take my mind off the pain I was in. I told the driver to take me shopping.

  To make matters worse, the hair transplant just didn’t work. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t take. It wasn’t the doctor’s fault. Perhaps it had something to do with the amount of drugs I was taking. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the one thing they told me I must not do in the weeks after the procedure was wear a hat, advice I chose to completely ignore on the grounds that, without a hat, I now looked like something that turns up towards the end of a horror film and starts strip-harvesting teenage campers with an axe. My head was covered in scabs and weird craters. I suppose I could have split the difference and worn something lighter than a hat, like a bandana, but appearing in public dressed as a gypsy fortune teller seemed a look too far, even for me.

  When news of recent events at Monsieur Putot’s clinic reached the press, they went crazy. Nothing I’d done in my career to date seemed to fascinate them in quite the way that having a hair transplant did. The paparazzi became obsessed with getting a photo of me without a hat on. You would have thought I was hiding the secret of eternal life and happiness under there rather than a bit of thinning hair. The paparazzi were out of luck – I kept a hat on in public more or less permanently for the next decade or so. In the late eighties, just before I got sober, I decided I’d had enough, dyed what was left of my hair platinum blond, and appeared that way on the cover of my album Sleeping with the Past. After I got sober, I had a weave done, where they take what’s left of your hair and attach more hair to it. I debuted my new look at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. A writer noted that I looked like I had a dead squirrel on my head. He was mean, but, I was forced to concede, he also had a point.

  Eventually I gave up and got a hairpiece, made by the same people who make wigs for Hollywood movies. It’s the strangest thing. People were absolutely obsessed with my hair, or lack of it, for years. Then I started wearing a wig and virtually no one’s mentioned it since. That said, a wig is not without drawbacks of its own. A few years back, I was sleeping at my home in Atlanta, when I woke up to the sound of voices in the apartment. I was convinced we were being burgled. I pulled on my dressing gown and started creeping out to see what was happening. I was halfway down the corridor when I realized I didn’t have my hairpiece on. I rushed back to the bedroom, reasoning that if I was going to be bludgeoned to death by intruders, at least I wouldn’t be bald when it happened. Wig on, I went into the kitchen to find two workmen, who had been sent up to fix a leak. They apologized profusely for waking me up, but despite my relief, I couldn’t help noticing they were staring at me. Perhaps they were starstruck, I thought, as I headed back to bed. Stopping off in the bathroom, I realized that the workmen weren’t bedazzled by the sight of the legendary Elton John appearing before them. They were bedazzled by the sight of the legendary Elton John appearing before them with his wig on back to front. I looked completely ridiculous, like Frankie Howerd after a heavy night in a strong wind. I took the thing off and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  If the world at large seemed to take the news about my sexuality very well, I did start to wonder if I could perhaps have timed the announcement a little better. One piece of advice I would give anyone planning on publicly coming out is this. Try and make sure you don’t do it immediately after being appointed chairman of a British football club, unless you want to spend your Saturday afternoons listening to thousands of away supporters singing – to the tune of ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’ – ‘Don’t sit down when Elton’s around, or you’ll get a penis up your arse’. I suppose I should deliver a lecture here decrying the homophobia of football fans in the mid-seventies, but I have to be honest: I thought it was funny. Mortifying, but funny. I didn’t feel threatened or frightened by it, it was obviously good-humoured, you had to take it on the chin. They’d sing it and I’d just smile and wave at them.

  In fact, when it came to Watford FC, I had far bigger problems to deal with than whatever the opposition supporters were singing. It was a Watford-supporting journalist who came to interview me back in 1974 who first mentioned that the club was in trouble, and not just on the pitch. I still followed them avidly, still went and watched them whenever I could, still stood on The Bend, the same place on the terrace at Vicarage Road where I’d stood with my dad as a kid. Standing there wasn’t the only thing about watching them that brought back childhood memories. Watford were still just as hopeless a team as they had been in the fifties, permanently stuck at the bottom of the football league. Supporting them sometimes made me think of being a member of Bluesology: I loved them to bits, but I knew we were going absolutely nowhere.

  Thanks to the journalist, I now learned that the club was in financial trouble, too. They had no money, because no one was interested in coming to watch them lose every week. They were desperately looking for ways to make some. I rang them up and suggested I could play a benefit gig at the ground. They agreed, and in return, offered me the chance to buy shares in the club and become vice-chairman. For the gig, I dressed up in a bee outfit – the closest thing I could find to the club’s mascot, a cartoon hornet called Harry – and brought Rod Stewart along to perform with me. If nothing else, this provided Rod with an afternoon of unceasing hilarity at the awfulness of Watford’s ground – which admittedly was a crumbling dump, still with a greyhound track running around the pitch – the abysmal nature of the team’s results in contrast
to his beloved Celtic and, especially, my new role as vice-chairman.

  ‘What the fuck do you know about football, Sharon?’ he asked. ‘If you knew anything, you wouldn’t support this lot.’

  I told him to fuck off. The rest of the board couldn’t have been more welcoming. If they were bothered about having the only vice-chairman in the football league who turned up to meetings with green and orange hair, towering over everyone else because of his platform soles, they never mentioned it. But my presence didn’t seem to be making much difference to Watford itself: the team was still hopeless, and the club was still broke. A thought kept playing on my mind. If supporting Watford was as frustrating as being in Bluesology, then maybe, as in Bluesology, it was down to me to do something about it.

  So when the chairman, a local businessman called Jim Bonser, offered to sell me the club outright in the spring of 1976, I said yes. John Reid was furious, going on and on about what a drain on my finances owning a football club was going to be. I told him to fuck off, too. I really wanted to do this. I’ve always had a competitive streak, whether it was squash or table tennis or Monopoly. Even today, if I play tennis, I don’t want to just knock a ball about and get some exercise. I want to play a game, and I want to win. So taking on the chairman’s job appealed to that aspect of my character. I liked the challenge. What’s more, I was sick of having my weekends ruined because Watford had lost.