by Elton John
Despite my visits to Paris and the amount of North Sea Oil consumed during its making, Sleeping with the Past turned out really well. The idea was to make an album influenced by old soul music, the kind of thing I’d played in nightclubs in the sixties, hence the title. You can really hear it in songs like ‘Amazes Me’ and ‘I Never Knew Her Name’. In fact, the only track I wasn’t sure about was a ballad called ‘Sacrifice’. Demonstrating again the infallible commercial instincts that led me to announce I was going to strangle Gus Dudgeon if ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ was ever released, I said I didn’t want it on the album. I was talked round, but then the record company wanted to release it as a single, which just seemed stupid – it was a five-minute-long ballad, no one was going to play it. At first, they put it out on the B-side of a song called ‘Healing Hands’, which I thought was much more commercial. The single didn’t do much until nearly a year later, in June 1990, when the DJ Steve Wright started ignoring what it said on the label and playing the other side on his Radio One show. Then it suddenly took off: within three weeks I had my first British solo Number One.
Remembering how I felt about my response to the AIDS crisis after Ryan’s funeral, I decided to donate all the royalties to four British AIDS charities, and announced I’d do the same thing with every single I released in future. I gave money to Stonewall, a new charity that was lobbying for LGBT rights in the wake of Section 28, a recent law that banned local governments and schools in Britain from ‘promoting’ homosexuality. When I appeared at the International Rock Awards, a televised ceremony, I called out the host, a homophobic comedian called Sam Kinison, who specialized in jokes about AIDS. A week after Ryan’s funeral, he’d been on Howard Stern’s radio show, sniggering about it. I said I was only there under protest, that Kinison was a pig and that the awards ceremony should never have employed him. His response was incredible. He started whining that I owed him an apology and that what I’d said was ‘way out of line’. A man who went around laughing at ‘faggots’ dying, whose whole schtick was supposed to be about causing offence and saying the unsayable, was now apparently terribly offended himself about being called a name. He could dish it out, but he couldn’t take it. He could whistle for his fucking apology.
And I played some benefit shows for Ryan’s charity, at the opening of Donald Trump’s new casino in Atlantic City. Jeanne White was my guest, but they weren’t great gigs. I was propping myself up with booze and drugs, making mistakes onstage. It was nothing too drastic – the occasional forgotten lyric and the odd fluffed piano line. I doubt anyone in the audience even noticed, and no one in the band mentioned it. I’ve never been big on post-gig inquests, where you all sit around and talk about where things went wrong: tell people when they’ve played great, don’t sit there nitpicking over little errors for hours, just let it go. But deep down I knew I’d broken one of my unwritten rules. I’d certainly raced offstage at the end of gigs before, pathetically eager to have a line, but I had made a point of never doing drugs before going on: that felt like letting an audience down.
* * *
Back in Atlanta, Hugh had some news for me. He was sick of drinking and taking drugs. He knew he couldn’t stop without help. So he was going into rehab. He had booked into a residential treatment programme at Sierra Tucson, the same rehab centre that had treated Ringo Starr for alcoholism a couple of years before. He was leaving that day.
You might think after what had happened in Indianapolis – the shame I’d felt in the company of Ryan’s mum and sister, the horror of seeing myself at the funeral – that this would have been news I welcomed. I should have asked to go with him. Instead, I went ballistic. I was furious. Hugh was my latest partner-in-crime: if he was admitting he had a problem, that meant I had a problem. By implication, he was accusing me of being a drug addict.
He wasn’t the first person to suggest I needed help. After he’d stopped working for me, my valet, Mike Hewitson, had written me a very sane, level-headed letter – ‘you’ve really got to stop this nonsense, stop putting that bloody stuff up your nose’ – and I’d responded by refusing to speak to him for a year and a half. Tony King had tried to talk to me. He had visited me with Freddie Mercury, and afterwards Freddie had told him that I looked like I was in trouble and that Tony should get involved: ‘You need to look after your friend.’ Coming from Freddie, no saint when it came to booze and drugs himself, that judgement should have carried a lot of weight. Instead, I dismissed what Tony had to say as sanctimonious preaching from an alcoholic in recovery. And a couple of years before, George Harrison had tried to talk to me at an insane party I’d held at a house I was renting in LA. I’d had the garden strung with lights, got Bob Halley to fire up the barbecue and invited everyone I knew that was in town. By the middle of the evening, I was flying, absolutely out of my mind, when a scruffy-looking guy I didn’t recognize wandered into the party. Who the hell was he? It must be one of the staff, a gardener. I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing helping himself to a drink. There was a moment’s shocked silence, broken by the sound of Bob Halley’s voice: ‘Elton, that’s not the fucking gardener. It’s Bob Dylan.’
Coked out of my brain and keen to make amends, I rushed over and grabbed him, and started steering him towards the house.
‘Bob! Bob! We can’t have you in those terrible clothes, darling. Come upstairs and I’ll fit you out with some of mine at once. Come on, dear!’
Bob stared at me, horrified. His expression suggested he was trying hard to think of something he wanted to do less than get dressed up like Elton John, and drawing a blank. This was the late eighties, and one of my recent looks had involved teaming a pink suit and a straw boater with a scale model of the Eiffel Tower on top of it, so you couldn’t really blame him. But full of cokey confidence, I wasn’t deterred. As I continued propelling him out of the garden, I heard the unmistakable sound of George’s mordant, Scouse-accented voice calling out to me.
‘Elton,’ he said. ‘I really think you need to go steady on the old marching powder.’
Bob somehow managed to talk his way out of being dressed in my clothes, but it didn’t change the fact that one of The Beatles was publicly telling me to do something about my cocaine habit. I just laughed it off.
This time, however, I didn’t laugh it off. The full force of the Dwight Family Temper was unleashed. Maybe it hit home harder than before because, after Indianapolis, I knew for a fact that Hugh was right. The ensuing row was terrible. I screamed and shouted. I said the most hurtful, wounding things I could think of to Hugh, the kind of stuff so horrible it literally comes back to haunt you – you suddenly remember having said it years later, completely out of the blue, and still clench your teeth and wince. None of it made any difference. Hugh’s mind was made up. He left for Arizona that afternoon.
Incredibly, given the way we had parted, Hugh later asked me to visit him at the treatment centre. Big mistake. I arrived and was gone within twenty minutes, which was long enough for me to cause a huge scene. I exploded again – this place was a total shithole, the therapists were a bunch of creeps, he was being brainwashed, he had to leave at once. When he wouldn’t, I stormed out and got on a plane back to London.
On arrival, I went straight to my rented house and locked myself in. I holed up in the bedroom for two weeks, alone, snorting cocaine and drinking whisky. On the rare occasions when I ate, I made myself sick immediately afterwards. I was up for days on end, watching porn, taking drugs. I wouldn’t answer the phone. I wouldn’t answer the door. If anyone knocked, I’d sit for hours afterwards in complete silence, rigid with paranoia and fear, terrified to move in case they were still outside, spying on me.
Sometimes I listened to music. I played ‘Don’t Give Up’ by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush over and over and over again, crying at the lyrics: ‘no fight left or so it seems, I am a man whose dreams have all deserted’. Sometimes I spent whole days writing out pointless lists of records I owned, songs I’d written, pe
ople I would like to work with, football teams I’d seen: anything to fill the time, to give me a reason to take more drugs, to stop myself going to sleep. I was supposed to have a Watford board meeting, but I rang them and told them I was unwell. I didn’t wash, I didn’t get dressed. I sat around, wanking, in a dressing gown covered in my own puke. It was sordid. Awful.
Sometimes I never wanted to see Hugh again. Sometimes I was desperate to speak to him, but I couldn’t get hold of him. He had moved into a halfway house, and after the scene I’d created at the rehab centre, no one would tell me where he was. Eventually, I made myself so ill that I realized this was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. If I carried on for a couple more days I genuinely would be dead: I’d either overdose or have a heart attack. Was that really what I wanted? I knew it wasn’t. Despite my self-destructive behaviour, I didn’t actually want to self-destruct. I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t want to die. I’d managed to track down Hugh’s ex-boyfriend, Barron Segar, who told me that he was in a halfway house in Prescott, a city four hours north of Tucson. I called Hugh. He sounded nervous. He said we could meet, but that there were conditions. I had to speak to his counsellor first. He wanted to see me, because there were things he wanted to say to me, but he wouldn’t say them unless I had a counsellor present too. He didn’t spell it out, but I suspected some kind of intervention was on the cards. I hesitated for a moment, but I was past convincing myself that, although things were bad, I was intelligent enough, successful enough and wealthy enough to sort them out on my own. I was too miserable and too ashamed of myself to even try. So I agreed: whatever it took.
Robert Key came with me and Connie Pappas met us at the airport in LA. I phoned Hugh’s counsellor. He told me that the meeting had to form part of Hugh’s therapy. We would both make a list of things we didn’t like about each other and read it out. I was terrified, but I did it.
The next day, I was in a tiny hotel room in Prescott, facing Hugh. We sat so close that our knees were touching, holding our lists. I went first. I said that I didn’t like the fact that Hugh was untidy. He left his clothes everywhere. He didn’t put CDs back in their cases after he had played them. He forgot to turn the lights off after he left a room at night. Stupid, niggly little irritations, the kind of things that get on your nerves about your partner every day.
Then it was Hugh’s turn. I noticed that he was shaking. He was more terrified than me. ‘You’re a drug addict,’ he said. ‘You’re an alcoholic. You’re a food addict and a bulimic. You’re a sex addict. You’re co-dependent.’
That was it. There was a long pause. Hugh was still shaking. He couldn’t look at me. He thought I was going to explode again and storm out.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I am.’
Both Hugh and his counsellor looked at me. ‘Well, do you want to get help?’ his counsellor asked. ‘Do you want to get better?’
I started to cry. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I need help. I want to get better.’
twelve
Lutheran Hospital,
Park Ridge,
Illinois
10 August 1990
We’ve lived together, you and I, for sixteen years, and boy, have we had some great times. But now it’s time for me to sit down and tell you how I really feel about you. I loved you so much. At first, we were inseparable – we seemed to meet so often, either at my house, or at other people’s. In the end, we were so fond of each other that I decided I couldn’t be without you. I wanted us to be a great couple and to hell with what other people thought.
When I first met you, you seemed to bring out everything that had been suppressed before. I could talk about anything I wanted for the first time in my life. There was something in your make-up that brought all my walls and barriers crashing down. You made me feel free. I was never jealous if other people shared you. In fact, I liked turning other people on to your charms. I realize how stupid I must have been, because you never really cared for me. It was all one-sided. You only care about how many people you can trap in your web.
My body and brain have suffered greatly because of my love for you – you have left me with permanent physical and mental scars. Remember that romantic saying, ‘I would die for you’? Well, I nearly did. Still, you’re a hard lady to get rid of. We’ve split so many times before but I always went back to you. Even though I knew it was a mistake, I still did. When there was no one else to comfort me, you were only a phone call away at any hour of the day or night. You never cease to amaze me – I’ve sent cars to pick you up and I even sent planes so that you and I could spend some hours or days together. And when you finally arrived, I was ecstatic to embrace you once more.
We had great parties with people. We had great, intense talks about how we were going to change the world. Of course, we never did, but boy, could we talk! We had sex with people we barely knew and who we really didn’t give a damn about. I didn’t care who they were as long as they slept with me. But, in the morning, they were gone, and I was alone again. You had gone too. Sometimes I wanted you so insatiably, but you had vanished. With you by my side, I was all-conquering, but with you gone I was just a sad little child again.
My family never liked you at all. In fact, they hated the spell you had me under. You managed to push me away from them and lots of my friends. I wanted them to understand how I felt about you, but they never listened, and I would feel anger, and hurt. I felt ashamed because I cared more about you than I did about my own flesh and blood. All I cared about was myself and you. So I kept you to myself. In the end, I didn’t want to share you anymore. I just wanted us to be alone. I became more miserable, because you ruled my life – you were my Svengali.
I guess I’ll try and come to the point of this letter. It’s taken me sixteen years to realize that you’ve taken me nowhere. Whenever I tried to have a relationship with someone else, I always brought you along at some point. So I have no doubts that it was me who was the user. But I found no compassion and love – what love I had for anyone was always superficial.
I had grown tired and hateful towards myself, but recently, I met someone again – someone I loved and trusted, and that person was adamant that this was going to be a two-way love affair, not a three-way one. He made me realize how self-centred I had become, and he made me think about my life and my sense of values. My life has ground to a halt. I now have the opportunity to change my way of living and thinking. I am prepared to accept humility, and therefore have to say goodbye to you for the final time.
You have been my whore. You have kept me from any sort of spirituality and you have kept me from finding out who I really am. I don’t want you and I to share the same grave. I want to die a natural death when I go, at peace with myself. I want to live the rest of my life being honest and facing the consequences rather than hiding behind my celebrity status. I feel as though, after sixteen years with you, I was dead anyway.
Once more, white lady – goodbye. If I run into you somewhere – and, let’s face it, you’re such a woman about town – I’ll ignore you and leave immediately. You’ve seen me enough over the years and I’m sick of you. You’ve won the fight – I surrender.
Thanks but no thanks,
Elton
* * *
The moment the words ‘I need help’ came out of my mouth, I felt different. It was like something had been switched back on inside me, like a pilot light that had gone out. I somehow knew that I was going to get well. But it wasn’t as straightforward as that. First of all, they couldn’t find a clinic anywhere in America that would take me. Almost all of them specialized in treating one addiction at a time, and I had three: cocaine, alcohol and food. I didn’t want them treated consecutively, which would have meant spending something like four months going from one facility to another. I wanted them all treated at once.
Eventually they found somewhere. When I saw it, I nearly refused to go in. Hugh’s treatment centre – which, you may remember, I loudly declared to be a total shithole – was really luxuri
ous. It was set in the countryside outside Tucson, with incredible views of the Santa Catalina mountains. It had a vast swimming pool, around which there were yoga classes. Mine was just an ordinary general hospital: the Lutheran, in a suburb of Chicago called Park Ridge. It was a big, grey, monolithic building, with mirrored glass windows. It didn’t seem much like a place that offered yoga classes by the pool. The only thing it had a view of was a shopping centre car park. But Robert Key was still with me, and I felt too embarrassed to turn tail. Besides, there was nowhere else to go. He dropped me in reception, gave me a hug, then went back to England. I checked in, under the name George King, on 29 July 1990. They told me I had to share a room, which didn’t go down very well, until I saw my room-mate. His name was Greg, he was gay and very attractive. At least there was something nice to look at around here.
I checked out again six days later. It wasn’t just that it was tough in there, although it was. I couldn’t sleep: I would lie awake all night, waiting for the daily alarm call at 6.30 a.m. I had panic attacks. I suffered from mood swings – not from high to low, but low to even lower, a fog of depression and anxiety that thickened and thinned but never cleared. I felt ill all the time. I felt weak. I was lonely. You weren’t allowed to make phone calls or speak to anyone outside. They allowed me to bend that rule once, when the news broke on TV that the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan had been killed in a helicopter crash. He was on tour with Eric Clapton at the time and his helicopter was part of a convoy that had taken off, carrying the artists and their crews. Ray Cooper was in Eric Clapton’s band. The news that was coming through was confusing – at one point, they incorrectly reported that Eric had died too – and I had no idea whether Ray was in the helicopter that had crashed. After a lot of tearful pleading, they let me find out: Ray was OK.