by Elton John
And, most of all, I was embarrassed. Not because of my addictions, but because we were expected to do things for ourselves – clean our rooms, make our beds – and that was something I was completely unused to. I’d allowed myself to get to the stage where I shaved and I wiped my arse, and paid other people to do everything else for me. I had no idea how to work a washing machine. I had to ask another patient, a woman called Peggy, to show me. After she realized that I wasn’t joking, she was kind and helpful, but that didn’t change the fact that I was a forty-three-year-old man who didn’t know how to clean his own clothes. When it came time to spend my $10 a week allowance on stationery or chewing gum, I realized I had no idea how much things cost. It was years since I’d done any shopping myself that didn’t involve an auction house or a high-end designer boutique. It was shameful: the completely unnecessary bubble that fame and wealth lets you build up around yourself, if you’re stupid enough to allow it. I see it all the time now, especially with rappers: they turn up everywhere with huge, pointless entourages, far bigger than the one I saw around Elvis that so shocked me at the time. They’re often doing it out of a spirit of charity – they’re giving a job to their friends from back home, when back home is somewhere no one would want to be – but it’s a dangerous thing to do. You think you’re surrounding yourself with people and making your life easier. But in reality you’re just isolating yourself from the real world, and, in my experience at least, the more isolated you are from reality – the more removed you become from the person you’re naturally supposed to be – the harder you’re making your life and the less happy you become. You end up with something like a medieval court, with you as the monarch and everyone around you jockeying for position, scared of losing their place in the pecking order and fighting each other to see who can be closest to you, who can exert the most influence on you. It’s a grotesque, soul-destroying environment to live in. And you’ve created it yourself.
But the real problem was that the treatment was based around the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, and as soon as my counsellor started talking to me about God, I flipped out. I didn’t want to know about religion: religion was dogma, it was bigotry, it was the Moral Majority and people like Jerry Falwell saying that AIDS was God’s judgement on homosexuals. It’s a stumbling block for a lot of people. Years later, when I tried to convince George Michael to go into rehab, he dismissed it out of hand for the same reason: ‘I don’t want to know about God, I don’t want to join some cult.’ I tried to explain that I had thought exactly the same thing too, but that just made things worse: he thought I was being patronizing and smug. But I really had been there too. That afternoon in Chicago, I stormed out of the meeting, went back to my room, packed my bag and left.
I got as far as the pavement outside. I sat down on a bench with my suitcase and burst into tears. I could easily make some phone calls and get out of here, but where was I going to go? Back to London? To do what? Sit around in a dressing gown covered in puke, doing coke and watching porn all day? It wasn’t a very appealing prospect. I lugged my suitcase sheepishly back into the hospital. A couple of days later, I nearly walked out again. My counsellor suggested that I wasn’t taking rehab seriously: ‘You’re not working hard enough, you’re just here for the ride.’ I really lost my temper. I told him that if I hadn’t been taking rehab seriously, I would have left long ago. I said he was picking on me because I was famous. He dismissed my arguments – it was like he wasn’t listening. So I called him a cunt. That seemed to get his attention. I was hauled up before a disciplinary board and warned about my language and behaviour.
But it was also agreed I would get a different counsellor, a woman called Debbie, who seemed less concerned about making an example of me because of who I was, and I started to make progress. I liked the routine. I liked doing things for myself. I got to grips, if not with the idea of God, then of a higher power. It made sense. I only had to look at my life, all the moments where instinct, or fate, had driven me along: everything from Ray Williams putting me in touch with Bernie almost as an afterthought, to the fact that I’d picked up that magazine with Ryan White’s story in it in the doctor’s waiting room, to the decision to clear out the contents of Woodside, which was starting to look less and less like a rash impulse and more and more like a premonition that my life was about to change. I started to embrace the AA meetings. After a while I was allowed visitors: Billie Jean King and her partner Ilana Kloss came to see me, so did Bernie and my friends Johnny and Eddi Barbis. I had to write all the time, including a farewell letter to cocaine – which Bernie read when he visited and broke down in tears – and a list of consequences of my drug and alcohol abuse. It was hard at first, but once I got started, I couldn’t stop. When I’d arrived at the hospital, a consultant had asked me how I was feeling, and I told him the truth: I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure if I’d had any real feelings for years, or whether everything was the result of the constant see-sawing of emotions brought on by taking drugs and booze. Now, though, it all came gushing out. The list of consequences went on and on for three pages. Self-hatred. Severe depression. Going onstage under the influence of drugs.
It was cathartic, but the group meetings would throw my problems into sharp relief. There were people there who had undergone the most horrifying things. At one, we were told to talk about our worst, dirtiest secret. I talked a little about my past relationships, about my unerring ability to take over other people’s lives for my own selfish, deluded reasons. Then it was the turn of a girl from somewhere in the Deep South of America, who was there for help with food addiction. It took her forty-five minutes to tell her story – at first because she was sobbing so hard she couldn’t get the words out and eventually because she was struggling to make herself heard over the sound of everyone else crying. She had grown up being abused by her father. When she was a teenager, she had become pregnant. She was too scared to tell anyone, so she ate more and more in order to put weight on to disguise her pregnancy. In the end she had delivered the baby herself, frightened and alone.
So the meetings were no place for the faint-hearted, but I grew to love them. They forced me to be honest, after years of deceiving other people and myself. If someone else has the guts to stand there and tell you about being abused by their own father, it compels you to step up and tell the truth about yourself – it’s just insulting their bravery to do anything else. When you’re an addict, it’s all about lying, covering your tracks, telling yourself you don’t have a problem, telling other people you can’t do something because you’re ill, when in reality you’re just wasted or hungover. Being honest was hard, but it was freeing. You got rid of all the baggage that came with lying: the embarrassment, the shame.
Whenever someone had tried to help before, my standard way of dismissing their concern was to say that they didn’t understand; they weren’t Elton John, how could they possibly know what it was like being me? But it quickly became apparent that the other addicts in the meetings did understand. They understood only too well. At one meeting, everyone was asked to write down what they liked and didn’t like about me. They made two lists on a board – my good points and my bad points. I started talking about what had been said, turning it over and over, calmly accepting the criticisms. I thought I was doing well, but after a while, someone stopped me, and pointed out that I had gone on and on about the negative comments, but never mentioned any of the positive ones. They said that was a sign of low self-esteem. I realized they were right. Perhaps that’s why I loved performing so much. You find it hard to accept personal compliments, so your life becomes about finding a more impersonal alternative: chart placings, crowds of nameless faces applauding. No wonder I always claimed my problems melted away onstage. No wonder my life offstage had become such a mess. I went back to my room and wrote I AM WORTHY, I AM A GOOD PERSON on the blue folder I kept my writing in. It was a start.
After six weeks, I was ready to leave. I flew back to London where I called in at the Rock
et office and told everyone I was taking some time off. No gigs, no new songs, no recording sessions for at least a year, maybe eighteen months. That was unheard of – I hadn’t taken more than a few weeks off a year since 1965 – but everyone accepted it. The only thing I would do was honour an unbreakable commitment to a short private charity show with Ray Cooper at the Grosvenor House hotel, which was terrifying, but we got through it. While I was there, I saw the artwork for a career-spanning box set I had planned before going into rehab and asked for it to be changed. I liked the title, To Be Continued … – it seemed positive and hopeful, even prescient, given that I’d chosen it before I cleaned up. But I wanted it to feature a current photo, rather than a collection of old shots from the seventies and eighties; that way, the title seemed like a comment on my life now, rather than on my past. And that was the only work I did for the next year, unless you count unexpectedly turning up onstage in full drag at one of Rod Stewart’s Wembley Arena gigs and sitting on his lap while he tried to sing ‘You’re In My Heart’. And I don’t: spoiling things for Rod has never felt like work, more a thoroughly enjoyable hobby.
I spent some time in Atlanta with Hugh, but our relationship began to peter out. Both our counsellors had warned against us staying together: they kept telling us that it wouldn’t work, that the dynamic of the relationship would change irrevocably now that we were sober. We both dismissed that as nonsense: half the writing I’d done in rehab had been about how much I loved Hugh, how much I missed him. So we rented an apartment, moved in together and discovered to our immense surprise that the dynamic of our relationship appeared to have changed irrevocably now that we were sober, and it wasn’t working out. It wasn’t a horrible split, we weren’t screaming and shouting at each other, but it was sad. We had been through a lot together, but it was time for us both to move on.
So for most of the next eighteen months I was in London, where I settled into a quiet routine. I bought the house I’d been renting, where I had holed up on my final binge. I lived alone. I didn’t bother with employing staff; I liked doing things myself. I bought myself a Mini and I got a dog from Battersea Dogs Home, a little mutt called Thomas. Every day, I would get up at 6.30 a.m. and take Thomas for a walk. I adored it. It’s a real recovering addict’s cliché to say that you notice things about your surroundings that you never saw while you were using – oh, the beauty of the flowers, the wonders of nature, all that crap – but it’s only a cliché because it’s true. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why I started collecting photography when I got sober. I’d been around incredible photographers for most of my career – Terry O’Neill, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, Norman Parkinson – but I just thought of it as a form of publicity, never an art, until I stopped drinking and using drugs. I went to the south of France for a holiday and visited a friend of mine, Alain Perrin, who lived outside Cahors. He was looking through black and white fashion photographs with a view to buying some. Idly peering over his shoulder, I was suddenly transfixed. They were by Irving Penn, Horst and Herb Ritts. I knew Herb Ritts – he’d taken the photo for the cover of Sleeping with the Past – but it felt like I was seeing his work in a completely new way. I loved everything about the photos Alain was looking at – the lighting, the shapes it had created and contorted; it all seemed extraordinary. I ended up buying twelve of them, and that was the start of an obsession that’s never stopped: photography is the love of my life in terms of visual art.
But I first felt that change in how I saw things walking around London. A hot summer had turned into a mild autumn. It was lovely being up and out early in the cool sunshine, walking Thomas around Holland Park or the grounds of St James’s church, watching the leaves gradually turn. Previously I had only ever been up at that time of the morning if I was still awake from the night before.
After the dog was walked, I would get in my Mini and drive to see a psychiatrist. I’d never visited one before, and it turned out to involve a steep learning curve. Some of the psychiatrists I’ve seen over the years have been great; they really helped me get an understanding of myself. And some of them turned into a bit of a nightmare: more interested in my celebrity and what associating with me could do for them. One of them was even struck off for molesting his patients – the female ones, I should add, lest anyone think I was among his victims.
I spent most of my time at meetings. I had left Chicago with strict instructions from my sponsor to go to an AA meeting the moment I cleared customs in London. Starved of football after weeks in America, I went to see a Watford game instead. That night, my sponsor rang. When I told him what I’d done, he yelled at me. A man who worked as a driver for the city of Chicago’s sanitation department and spent most of his life communicating with his colleagues over the noise of his garbage truck, he could really yell. That night, he sounded like he was trying to make himself heard on the other side of the Atlantic without the aid of a telephone. More used to shouting at people than being shouted at, I was taken aback, but I was also abashed. He was a good man – I eventually ended up being his son’s godfather – but he was genuinely angry, and his anger was born out of concern for me.
So I followed his advice. I became very strict about attending meetings: Alcoholics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Anorexics and Bulimics Anonymous. I went to meetings in Pimlico, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in Marylebone, on Portobello Road. Sometimes I went to three or four meetings a day. I went to a hundred in a month. Some of my friends began expressing the opinion that I was now addicted to going to meetings about addiction. They were probably right, but it was a substantial improvement on the things I’d been addicted to previously. Perhaps there was a meeting I could attend to deal with it.
At the very first meeting I went to, a photographer leapt out and got a shot of me leaving. Someone must have recognized me there and tipped them off, which was obviously against the rules. It was on the front page of the Sun the next day: ELTON IN ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. As, this time, they neglected to suggest that I attended in leather shorts or twirling a dildo, I let it pass. I didn’t mind who knew. I was taking a positive step. I kept going to the meetings because I enjoyed them. I liked the people I met. I always volunteered to make the tea, and I made lasting friends, people I’m still in touch with today: ordinary people, who saw me as a recovering addict first and Elton John second. In a weird way, the meetings reminded me of being at Watford FC – there was no special treatment laid on for me, and there was that same sense of people pulling together towards the same goal. You heard the most extraordinary things. Women in the Anorexics and Bulimics meetings would talk about taking a single pea, cutting it into four and eating a quarter for lunch and a quarter for dinner. I would think, ‘that’s insane’, but then I would remember how I’d been a few months before – unwashed and pissed out of my mind at 10 a.m., literally doing a line of coke every five minutes – and realized they must have thought exactly the same about me.
Not everything that happened in the months after I got sober was wonderful. My father died at the end of 1991: he had never really recovered from the heart bypass operation eight years before. I didn’t go to his funeral. It would have seemed hypocritical, plus the press would have turned up en masse and the whole thing would have become a circus. My father didn’t share in my fame, so why inflict the effects of it on him at the end? Besides, I’d already done enough mourning for my relationship with my dad, and I’d reached a peace, of sorts: I wished that things had been different, but it was what it was. Sometimes you have to look at the hand you’ve been dealt and throw in the cards.
And then there was Freddie Mercury. He hadn’t told me he was ill – I’d just found out, through mutual friends. I visited him a lot when he was dying, although I could never stay for much longer than an hour. It was too upsetting – I didn’t think he wanted me to see him like that. Someone so vibrant and so necessary, someone that would have just got better with age and gone from strength to strength, dying in such a horrible, arbitrary way. A year later, they
could have kept him alive with antiretroviral drugs. Instead, there was nothing they could do for him. He was too frail to get out of bed, he was losing his sight, his body was covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, and yet he was still definitely Freddie, gossiping away, completely outrageous: ‘Have you heard Mrs Bowie’s new record, dear? What does she think she’s doing?’ He lay there, surrounded by catalogues of Japanese furniture and art, interrupting the conversation to telephone auction houses in order to bid for items he liked the look of: ‘Darling, I’ve just bought this, isn’t it wonderful?’ I couldn’t work out whether he didn’t realize how close to death he was, or if he knew perfectly well but was determined not to let what was happening to him stop him being himself. Either way, I thought it was incredible.
Eventually he made the decision to stop taking any medication other than painkillers, and died at the end of November 1991. On Christmas Day, Tony arrived at my front door, carrying something in a pillowcase. I opened it up and it was a watercolour by an artist whose work I collected called Henry Scott Tuke, an Impressionist who painted male nudes. There was a note with it: ‘Darling Sharon – thought you’d love this. Love, Melina.’ While he was lying there, he’d spotted it in one of his auction catalogues and bought it for me. He was thinking about Christmas presents for a Christmas he must have known in his heart he wouldn’t see; thinking about other people when he was really too ill to think of anyone but himself. Like I said before: Freddie was magnificent.
Some people really struggle when they come out of addiction into sobriety, but I was the opposite. I was elated. I never really wanted to use again; I was just happy waking up every morning without feeling like shit. Bizarrely, I would dream about cocaine all the time. I still do, almost every week, and it’s been twenty-eight years since I last did a line. It’s always the same dream: I’m snorting coke when I hear someone coming into the room, usually my mother. Then I try to hide what I’m doing, but I spill it and it goes everywhere – all over the floor, all over me. But it never made me hanker after cocaine. Quite the opposite. When I wake up, I can almost feel the numbing sensation of the coke sliding down the back of my throat – always the part of doing it that I hated – and I just think ‘thank God that’s over’. I sometimes wish I could have a glass of wine with my dinner, or a beer with friends, but I know I can’t. I don’t mind people drinking around me at all: it’s my problem, not theirs. But I never feel like having a line, and I can’t bear being anywhere near people who are doing it. The second I walk into a room, I know. I can just sense people are on it. The way they’re talking – their voices pitched slightly louder than they need to be, not really listening – and how they’re behaving. I just leave. I don’t want to do cocaine, and I don’t want to be around people who are doing it, because, quite frankly, it’s a drug that makes people act like arseholes. I wish I’d realized that forty-five years ago.