by Elton John
Renate and I divorced in early 1988. We had been married for four years. It was the right thing to do, but it was a horrible feeling. I’d broken the heart of someone I loved and who loved me unconditionally, someone I couldn’t fault in any way. She could have taken me to the cleaners, and I wouldn’t have blamed her: everything that had gone wrong was down to me and me alone. But Renate was too dignified and too decent for that. Despite all the pain, there was no acrimony involved at all. For years afterwards, whenever something happened to me, the press would turn up on her doorstep, looking for her to dish the dirt, and she never, ever has: she just told them to leave her alone.
I saw her once after we divorced. She had moved out of Woodside to a beautiful cottage in a small village. For all that had happened, there was still a very real love there. When I had children, I invited her to Woodside, because I wanted her to meet them; I wanted to see her, I wanted her to be part of our lives, and us part of hers, in some way. But she didn’t want to, and I didn’t push the issue. I have to respect how she feels.
eleven
It was the state of the squash court that made me realize my passion for collecting had perhaps got the tiniest bit out of control. The squash court was one of the things that I’d liked about Woodside when I first moved in. I would challenge anyone who came over to a game. But no one had played squash at Woodside for some time, because no one could actually get into the court anymore. The place was full of packing cases, and the packing cases were full of things I’d bought: on tour, on holiday, from auctions, whatever. I hadn’t been able to unpack any of it, because there was literally no room anywhere in the house to put any more stuff. Every inch of wall space was covered with paintings, posters, gold and platinum discs, framed awards. My record collection was piled up all over the place. I had a special room for it that was like a maze, with corridor after corridor of floor-to-ceiling shelving that housed everything I’d bought since I was a kid: I still had the 78s I’d spent my pocket money on in Siever’s in Pinner, with ‘Reg Dwight’ written on the labels in ink and photos of the artists I’d cut out of magazines Sellotaped to the sleeves. But I’d managed to outgrow the room, by buying someone else’s record collection as well. He was a BBC radio producer called Bernie Andrews who had worked on Saturday Club and with John Peel, and he owned every single released in Britain between 1958 and 1975, thousands and thousands of the things. Of course, loads of them were absolutely crap: even in pop’s most miraculous years, the good releases were outweighed by the bad. But it appealed to my completist collector’s mentality. Owning every single released in Britain! It was like some mad childhood fantasy come true.
If I’d just collected records, I might have been able to cope, but I didn’t. I collected everything: art, antiques, clothes, chairs, jewellery, glassware. There were beautiful art deco vases and Gallé and Tiffany table lamps just sat on the floor, because there was no space left on any tables – a pretty incredible state of affairs given how much furniture I’d managed to cram into every room. Walking around the house was like taking part in the world’s most expensive obstacle course. If you put a foot wrong, or turned round too quickly – which I can tell you for a fact is quite easy to do if you’re spending a significant portion of your life drunk and on drugs – you could smash something worth thousands of pounds. It didn’t really make for a terribly relaxing environment in which to live. I’d have people over and spend half my time bellowing at them to be careful or to watch what they were doing. I’d occasionally stick my head round the door of the squash court – there was just about enough room to do that, if you breathed in – and feel oddly despairing. Ever since I was a kid, owning things had always made me feel happy, but now it just made me feel overwhelmed. What was I going to do with all this stuff?
A few months after Renate and I separated, I came up with a radical solution. I was going to sell it. All of it. Every painting, every bit of memorabilia, every stick of furniture, every objet d’art. All the clothes, all the jewellery, all the glasses, all the gifts that fans had sent me. Everything in the house, except the records. I got in touch with Sotheby’s, who had recently held a huge posthumous sale of Andy Warhol’s possessions, and told them I wanted to auction the lot. They sent experts out to Woodside to have a nose around. The experts left looking a little faint. I couldn’t work out whether they were floored by the quantity of stuff I was selling – one of them told me, in hushed tones, that I had the largest private collection of Carlo Bugatti furniture in the world – or whether they were just reeling from the sheer hideousness of some of it. I liked to think I had developed a good eye for art and furniture, but I also had a remarkably high threshold for gaudy kitsch. There were things in my home that made my old stage outfits look like the last word in understated good taste. There was a model of a bonobo gorilla in an Edwardian dress that a fan had sent me, with an accompanying note explaining that it was a sculpture representing the futility of war. There was a radio in the shape of a doll wearing a see-through negligee: the volume and tuning controls were mounted on her tits. There was a pair of brass bath taps with large Perspex testicles attached to them.
I decided that I should keep some original Goon Show scripts, complete with Spike Milligan’s handwritten annotations, that I’d bought at an auction, and four paintings: two Magrittes, one Francis Bacon portrait of his lover George Dyer that people had told me I was crazy to spend £30,000 on back in 1973, and The Guardian Readers, the Patrick Procktor painting that had appeared on the cover of Blue Moves. Everything else could go.
Before you get the wrong idea, I should add that I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of leading a more simple and meaningful life, uncoupled from the yoke of consumerism and unencumbered by material possessions. If anyone thought that, they were swiftly disabused the first time I went to Sotheby’s for a meeting about the upcoming auction: supposedly there to discuss disposing of my worldly goods, I instead ended up buying two paintings by Russian avant-garde artists Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky. It was more that I wanted a new start. I wanted to completely remodel and redecorate Woodside. I didn’t want to live in a berserk pop star’s house anymore, I wanted somewhere that felt like a home.
It took Sotheby’s three days just to transport everything from Woodside to their London warehouse. There was so much to sell that there had to be four separate auctions. One was for stage costumes and memorabilia, one for jewellery, one for art deco and art nouveau and one called ‘diverse collections’, which had everything in it from Warhol silkscreens to suitcases to sporrans – at some point I appeared to have bought two of those.
I used a photo of some of the lots on the cover of my new album, which I’d called Reg Strikes Back: it seemed like the right title, after the events of 1987. Sotheby’s held an exhibition before the auction. They only showed a quarter of what was up for sale, but it filled the Victoria and Albert Museum. Bizarrely, the former prime minister, Edward Heath, came to have a look at it: maybe he was in the market for a pair of bath taps with Perspex testicles attached. The auctions were a huge success. They had to put up crash barriers outside to cope with the crowds. Paintings sold for double the anticipated price. Things that I thought fans might pick up for a few quid went for thousands. Everything went: the bonobo gorilla representing the futility of war, the sporrans, the doll-in-a-negligee radio. They even sold the banners that hung outside Sotheby’s advertising the auction.
I didn’t go. I left Woodside the day the removal vans arrived. I didn’t set foot in the house again for two years. I wasn’t to know it then, but by the time I came back, my life would have changed even more than my home had.
* * *
I decided to move to London while the house was being emptied. At first I stayed in a hotel – the Inn On The Park, the location for the famous story about me ringing the Rocket office and demanding they do something about the wind outside that was keeping me awake. This is obviously the ideal moment to state once and for all that this story is a complete u
rban myth, that I was never crazy enough to ask my record company to do something about the weather; that I was simply disturbed by the wind and wanted to change rooms to somewhere quieter. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that, because the story is completely true. I absolutely was crazy and deluded enough to ring the international manager of Rocket, Robert Key, and ask him to do something about the wind outside my hotel room. I certainly didn’t want to change rooms. It was 11 a.m., I’d been up all night and there were drugs everywhere: the last thing I needed was the hotel staff bustling in to help me move to a different floor. I angrily outlined the situation to Robert. To his lasting credit, he gave my request very short shrift. On the other end of the phone, I heard the muffled sound of Robert, with his hand over the receiver, telling the rest of the office, ‘Oh God, she’s finally lost it.’ Then he spoke to me again. ‘Elton, are you fucking insane? Now get off the phone and go back to bed.’
I started renting a house in west London, but I spent most of my time away on tour or in America. I’d fallen in love with a guy called Hugh Williams, who lived in Atlanta. But I also found myself in Indianapolis. Ryan White had been happier since moving to Cicero, but nothing could stop the progress of his disease. In the spring of 1990, his mother Jeanne called and told me that he had been rushed into the Riley Hospital for Children with a severe respiratory infection. He was on life support. I flew there straight away. For the next week, I tried to make myself useful around the hospital while Ryan slipped in and out of consciousness. I didn’t know what else to do to help. I cleared up the room. I fetched sandwiches and ice cream. I put flowers in vases and bought stuffed animals for the other kids on the ward. I acted like Jeanne’s secretary, fending off phone calls, doing the job that I paid Bob Halley to do for me. Ryan had been such a visible advocate for AIDS sufferers that he had become a celebrity. When the news that he was dying got out, Jeanne was deluged with people wanting to offer their support and it was too much for her to deal with. I held the phone up to Ryan’s ear when Michael Jackson called. All Ryan could do was listen. He was too weak to answer.
When I went back to my hotel, I would think about Jeanne and her daughter Andrea. They were watching Ryan die, slowly and painfully. They had prayed for a miracle, but the miracle never came. They had every right to feel angry and resentful. But they didn’t feel that way. They were stoic, they were forgiving, they were patient and kind. Even in the most awful circumstances I loved being around them, but they made me feel ashamed of myself, in a way I’d never felt before. I spent half my life feeling angry and resentful about things that didn’t matter. I was the kind of person who got on the phone and shouted at people because the weather outside my Park Lane hotel didn’t suit me. Whatever else had been wrong with my childhood, I hadn’t been brought up to behave that way. How the fuck had I become like this? I’d always managed somehow to justify my behaviour to myself, or to make a joke of it, but now I couldn’t: real life had barged into my celebrity bubble.
Because they knew I was in Indianapolis, I was asked to play a gig at the Hoosier Dome for Farm Aid, a charity set up by Neil Young, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. It was a huge event, with everyone from Lou Reed to Carl Perkins to Guns N’ Roses performing. I had been happy to get involved, but now I didn’t want to go, because I didn’t want to leave Jeanne by Ryan’s bedside; I knew he didn’t have long left. I rushed over there and literally ran onstage in the same clothes I had been wearing at the hospital. I played without a backing band, raced through ‘Daniel’ and ‘I’m Still Standing’, dedicated ‘Candle In The Wind’ to Ryan, then ran offstage again. I was back at the hospital within an hour, and I was there when Ryan died the next morning, 8 April, at 7.11 a.m. He was eighteen. It was a month before his high-school graduation.
Jeanne had asked me to be one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, and also to perform. I sang ‘Skyline Pigeon’ with a photo of Ryan on top of my piano. It was a song from my first album, Empty Sky, one of the first really good things Bernie and I had written, and it seemed to fit the occasion: ‘dreaming of the open, waiting for the day that he can spread his wings and fly away again’. The funeral was a huge event. It was broadcast live on CNN. Michael Jackson and the First Lady, Barbara Bush, were there. There were press photographers everywhere and hundreds of people standing outside in the rain. Some of the mourners were people who had made the Whites’ lives a misery back in Kokomo; they came and apologized and asked Jeanne to forgive them and she did.
Ryan was in an open casket. After the service, family and close friends filed towards his body to say goodbye. He was wearing his faded denim jacket and a pair of mirrored sunglasses – his choice of clothes to be buried in. I put my hands on his face and told him I loved him.
I went back to my hotel in a strange mood. It wasn’t just grief, there was something else bubbling underneath: I was angry at myself. I kept turning over the fact that Ryan had done so much in such a short time to help people with AIDS. A kid with nothing, and he’d changed public perceptions. Ronald Reagan, who’d done his best to ignore AIDS while he was president, had written a piece that the Washington Post published that morning, praising Ryan and condemning the ‘fear and ignorance’ that surrounded the disease. I was the highest-profile gay rock star in the world. I’d spent the eighties watching friends and colleagues and ex-lovers die horribly; years later, I had all their names engraved on plaques and put them on the wall of the chapel at Woodside. But what had I done? Virtually nothing. I had made sure I got tested for HIV every year, and by a miracle I came up negative every time. I had played a couple of benefit gigs, and helped record a charity single, a version of Burt Bacharach’s ‘That’s What Friends Are For’, with Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight. It had been a huge success – it was the biggest-selling single of the year in America and it raised $3 million. I had attended some of Elizabeth Taylor’s fundraising events, because I’d known Liz for years. She had a grand image, but she wasn’t like that at all in real life. She was incredibly kind and welcoming and she was hilarious – she had a really filthy English sense of humour – although you had to watch your jewellery around her. She was obsessed. If you were wearing something she liked the look of, she’d somehow just charm you into giving it to her; you would walk into her dressing room wearing a Cartier watch and leave without it, never entirely sure how she’d managed to get it off you. I suppose she used exactly the same skill when it came to fundraising. She had the guts to stand up and do something, helping start the American Foundation for AIDS Research, forcing Hollywood to pay attention, despite everyone telling her getting involved with AIDS would damage her career.
I should have been doing the same. I should have been on the front line. I should have put my head on the chopping block the way Liz Taylor did. I should have been marching with Larry Kramer and ACT UP. Everything I’d done so far – charity singles, celebrity fundraisers – seemed superficial and showbizzy. I should have been using my fame as a platform to gain attention and make a difference. I felt sick.
I turned on the TV and watched the news coverage of the funeral, which only made things worse. It was a beautiful service, and my performance had been fitting. But every time the camera focused on me, I was horrified. I looked awful in a way that had nothing to do with the tragedy of Ryan’s death and everything to do with the way I was living my life. I was bloated and grey. My hair was white. I looked worn out, exhausted, ill. I was forty-three years old, and I looked about seventy. God, the state of me. Something had to change.
But not yet. I left Indianapolis and life went back to my idea of normal. I had recorded a new album before Ryan got really sick, and now I had to promote it, something I had neglected to do while Ryan was dying. Sleeping with the Past had been recorded at a studio in rural Denmark called Puk. I think the idea was partly to try and avoid the press, who were crawling all over the place because of my divorce from Renate, and partly to try and avoid the kind of behaviour that had gone on during the making of Leather Jac
kets. In a sense it worked. Even I couldn’t figure out how to source any drugs in the depths of the Danish countryside. It was the middle of winter, freezing cold, completely desolate: you would have had more luck finding a cocaine dealer on the moon. But every night we would head out to the nearest town, Randers, and hit the pubs, marvelling at the way that Danes drank. Lovely people, very friendly, always happy to appeal to my competitive nature by challenging us to a game of darts, but you see them around booze and the old Viking heritage becomes very apparent. I shouldn’t have tried to keep up with them, but my competitive nature got the better of me there, too. The schnapps the locals drank was lethal – they called it North Sea Oil. I became quite used to waking up on the floor of someone else’s room, with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, gripped by the conviction that this particular case of alcohol poisoning was going to prove fatal. Other members of the crew fared even worse than me: on producer Chris Thomas’s birthday, I hired a brass band to knock on his door first thing in the morning and launch into ‘Happy Birthday To You’. You can imagine how marvellous that sounded to a man with a raging hangover.
The schnapps, the pubs, the hangovers: it’s worth pointing out that I’m describing the working week here. At weekends, I let my hair down a bit. I would fly to Paris and party. There was a gay club I loved on the rue de Caumartin, called Boy. In truth, I thought I was getting a bit too old for clubbing, but the music at Boy kept me coming back. Laurent Garnier and David Guetta DJ’d there – it was the start of house and techno taking over in Paris’s clubs and it felt as fresh and exciting and bold as disco had back in the seventies. Whenever I hear ‘Good Life’ by Inner City, I think about the dance floor in Boy going crazy.