by Elton John
When he came back from the bathroom and saw me in tears, David’s face fell.
‘Oh God,’ he sighed, ‘what’s the matter?’
By now bitterly experienced in dealing with my moods, his immediate thought was that I didn’t like some minor aspect of the holiday and was going to start yelling about how we had to leave at once. I said it was nothing like that: I was just thinking about the past. On the iPod, Leon was still singing: ‘Well all the fun has died, it’s raining in my heart, I know down in my soul I’m really going to miss you’. God, that man could sing. What had happened to him? I hadn’t heard anyone mention his name in years. I went to the phone and called my friend Johnny Barbis in LA and asked him if he could track Leon down. He came back with a Nashville number. I called it, and a voice answered. It sounded more gravelly than I remembered, but it was definitely him – that same Oklahoma drawl. I asked how he was. He said he was in bed, watching Days of Our Lives on TV: ‘I’m all right. Just about making ends meet.’ That was one way of putting it. Leon had made some bad business decisions, he had a lot of ex-wives, and times had changed. Now he was touring anywhere that would have him. One of the finest musicians and songwriters in the world, and he was playing sports bars and pubs, beer festivals and motorbike conventions, towns I’d never heard of in Missouri and Connecticut. I told him I was in the middle of nowhere in Africa, and I was listening to his music and thinking about the past. I thanked him for everything he’d done for me and told him how important his music was in my life. He sounded genuinely touched.
‘Well, that’s real nice of you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’
After we’d finished talking, I put the phone down and looked at it. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t explain it, but I just knew that wasn’t why I had called him. I picked the phone up and dialled his number again. He laughed when he picked up.
‘My God, forty-five years I don’t hear from you and now twice in ten minutes?’
I asked him if he wanted to make an album, both of us, together. There was a long silence.
‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘Do you think I can do it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m really old.’
I told him I was pretty old, too, and if I could, he could, if he’d like to.
He laughed again. ‘The hell I would – yeah.’
It wasn’t an act of charity. It was more pure indulgence for me: if you’d told me in 1970 that I’d one day make a record with Leon Russell I would have laughed at you. And it wasn’t always easy. He had mentioned having some health issues on the phone, but I didn’t realize how sick Leon was until he arrived at the studio in LA. He looked like the ailing patriarch in a Tennessee Williams play: a long white beard, dark glasses and a cane. He struggled to walk. He would sit in a La-Z-Boy recliner in the studio for a couple of hours a day and sing and play. That was all he could manage, but what he did in those two hours was incredible. There were moments when I wondered if his contributions to the album were going to be released posthumously. One day, his nose started running: it was fluid leaking from his brain. He was rushed into hospital for surgery and treated for heart failure and pneumonia while he was there.
But we finished the record. We called it The Union and it went Top Five in the US. We toured together in the autumn of 2010, playing 15,000-seat arenas, places Leon said he’d never seen the inside of in decades. Some nights he had to come onstage in a wheelchair, but it didn’t make any difference to how he sounded. He killed it every time.
And Leon finally got his due as a result of that album. He got a new record deal and was made a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I was so pleased for him that I momentarily forgot my vow never to darken its doors again, and offered to give his induction speech. He made money and bought himself a new bus and toured around the world in bigger and better venues than he’d played for years. He was touring until the day he died in 2016. If you didn’t see him, I’m sorry: you missed out. Leon Russell was the greatest.
sixteen
The first time it happened was in South Africa in 2009, at a drop-in centre for kids living with HIV and its after-effects. It was in the centre of Soweto, a place where orphaned children and kids who’d been forced to step up and become the head of their household could go and get things they needed, whether that was a hot meal, or counselling, or just help with their homework. We were visiting it because it was funded by the Elton John AIDS Foundation and they had put on a presentation for us: the women who ran the place and the children who benefited from it, explaining how it worked. A small boy wearing the kind of brightly patterned shirt that Nelson Mandela had made famous presented me with a little spoon, a symbol of the South African sugar industry. But then he wouldn’t go back and sit with the other kids. I don’t know why – he didn’t have a clue who I was – but he just seemed to take a shine to me. He was called Noosa, and he stuck to my side for the rest of the visit. I held his hand and pulled faces and made him laugh. He was adorable. I wondered what his life in the outside world might be like: God, the horror stories you heard in South Africa about how AIDS had devastated lives that were no picnic to start off with. Where was he going when he left here? Back to what? But looking at him, I realized I felt something that wasn’t just pity or fondness. There was a flicker of something else there, something that was more powerful than just ‘awww’, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I wandered over to David.
‘This boy’s just wonderful,’ I said. ‘He’s an orphan. Maybe he needs support. What do you think?’
David looked completely baffled. He had broached the subject of starting a family before – the idea of a gay couple adopting children was nothing like as anomalous as it had once been. But every time he mentioned the idea, I had presented him with a list of objections so long it just wore him into submission.
I adored kids. I’ve got umpteen godsons and goddaughters – some of them are famous, like Sean Lennon and Brooklyn and Romeo Beckham, and some of them aren’t known at all, like the son of my AA sponsor – and I love them very much. But having your own children was a different matter entirely. I was too old. Too set in my ways. Too absent – always off on tour. Too keen on porcelain and photographs and modern art, none of which respond well to being knocked over, or drawn on with crayon, or smeared with Marmite, or any of the other things small children are famously keen on doing. Too busy to find the room in my life that was clearly needed to be a parent. I wasn’t being grumpy, I was just being honest. But really, my own childhood was at the root of every objection. Bringing up children was an incredible challenge, and I knew from personal experience how awful it was if you fucked that challenge up. You obviously want to believe you wouldn’t make the same mistakes as your own mum and dad, but what if you did? I couldn’t live with the thought of making my own children as miserable as I had been.
All those protests, and now here I was suggesting we look into adopting an orphan from Soweto. No wonder David looked baffled; I was too. What the hell was going on? I had no idea, but something had definitely just happened, completely out of my control. It was almost as if a real paternal instinct had finally kicked in in my sixties, the same way my libido had unexpectedly arrived, years after everyone else’s, when I was twenty-one.
Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. We made some enquiries and quickly found out that the little boy was in a relatively good place. He lived with his grandmother and sister and another relation, and they were well looked after, a tight-knit family – so tight-knit that when Noosa attached himself to me, his sister had burst into tears, thinking we were going to take him away from her. That settled it. We wouldn’t help him at all by uprooting him from his culture and his own identity and bringing him to the UK: it was better to invest in his future in his own country. I saw him a few more times, when I went back to South Africa to perform or to do work with the AIDS Foundation, and he was still completely adorable, and clearly very happy.
It was an odd incident, but I put it out of my mind, knowin
g that we had done the right thing. I retreated back to my usual position regarding children. I don’t think either of us brought up the subject again. And then, that same year, we went to Ukraine.
The orphanage was in Donetsk, a big industrial city in the centre of the country. It was specifically for children aged one to eleven, a place where they could be monitored to see if they developed HIV – not every child born to a mother with HIV tests positive. If they did, they got antiretroviral treatment, care and support. We were being shown round, handing out food, nappies and schoolbooks – not lavish gifts; stuff they really, really needed – to the care workers and the kids. I played ‘Circle Of Life’ for them, on a piano I’d donated. Just afterwards, a tiny boy ran straight over to me, and I picked him up and hugged him. They told me he was called Lev. He was fourteen months old but looked younger – he was so small. His story was horrendous. His father was a convicted murderer who’d strangled a teenage girl. His mother was HIV positive, a chronic alcoholic who had tuberculosis and couldn’t look after her children. They didn’t know whether he had HIV yet, although he had an older half-brother called Artem who had tested positive for the disease. Lev had blond hair and brown eyes, and a grin that seemed completely at odds with his surroundings and with the hand that life had dealt him. I just melted every time he smiled at me.
I didn’t put him down for the rest of the time we were there. Whatever had happened in Soweto happened again, only more intensely: there was an immediate bond, some kind of very powerful connection. I was in a raw emotional state anyway. A few days before, Guy Babylon, who’d played keyboards in my band for eleven years, had suddenly died. He was only fifty-two, he seemed perfectly fit and healthy but had a heart attack while swimming. It was a reminder that you only get so long, that you never know what’s around the corner. Maybe that gave me some real clarity about what was important to me about life. Why try and deny how you really feel, deep down, about something as fundamental as fatherhood?
The rest of the party moved on and I stayed behind in the room, playing with Lev. I didn’t feel I could leave. Eventually David came back to see where I was. As soon as he walked into the room, I started gushing.
‘This little boy is remarkable, he’s called Lev, he’s an orphan. He found me, I didn’t find him. I think this is a calling. I think the universe is sending us a message, and we should adopt him.’
David looked even more stunned than he had in Soweto. Clearly, he hadn’t expected his simple enquiry of ‘what are you doing?’ to be answered with a load of stuff about higher callings and messages from the universe. But he could see I was deadly serious. He told me to slow down and keep things low-key for the moment – we had to find out more about Lev’s situation, about his family, about whether he could leave the orphanage before they knew whether or not he was HIV positive.
I carried Lev around for the rest of the day. I was still holding him when we were ushered outside for a press conference in a makeshift marquee. I deposited him in David’s lap while I answered the reporters’ questions. The last one was about the fact that I’d said I never wanted children: had seeing kids that needed homes in the orphanage changed my mind? Here was a perfect opportunity for me to demonstrate that I’d fully grasped what David had said about the need to keep any thoughts I had on Lev’s future low-key. Instead, I blurted out that my mind had changed, that the little boy sitting with David in the front row had stolen our hearts, and that I would love to adopt him and his brother if it was possible.
* * *
You may recall a few chapters ago that I explained why I’m pleased I became famous in an era before record companies and managers forced artists to get media training and watch what they say: that I’m proud of always giving straight answers and speaking my mind. Perhaps now I should qualify that statement by noting that there are a couple of points in my career where media training has suddenly seemed like a very good idea indeed, where I’ve wished that, for once in my life, I just answered a question by saying something unbelievably boring and bland and evasive, rather than telling the truth. This was definitely one of those points. I realized I shouldn’t have said it as soon as it came out of my mouth, not least because I noticed David lower his head, close his eyes and mutter something that looked very much like the words ‘oh shit’.
‘That comment,’ he complained, as we were driven back to the airport, ‘is going to go everywhere, in minutes.’
He was right. By the time we landed in Britain, his BlackBerry was packed with texts and voice messages from friends, congratulating us on our wonderful news, which meant it had already hit the media. Certain sections of the British press couldn’t have reacted more negatively if I’d said I harboured a pathological hatred for children and was planning on personally burning down the Donetsk orphanage later that night. The Daily Mail and the Sun immediately dispatched journalists to Ukraine. One got hold of a government minister who said that adoption was impossible, because we were a gay couple and, besides, I was too old. Another visited Lev’s mother, bought her vodka and took her to the orphanage for a photo opportunity, which automatically set any adoption process back by a year: in order for a child to become a ward of state, they had to have been in an orphanage for twelve months without a visit from any family member. The journalist either didn’t know, or didn’t care – they hadn’t thought about it. There was something really horrible, if inevitable, about the way the story became entirely about me and David, and not the children involved. It was hard not to think that if I hadn’t said anything at the press conference, none of this would have happened. Perhaps it would have made no difference at all. But we would never know.
We kept trying, looking at the logistics of adoption, but it became obvious that it wouldn’t work. We could have appealed to the European Court of Justice, but there didn’t seem to be much point – Ukraine wasn’t part of the EU. We had contacted a psychologist, asking about the emotional process of introducing kids who’d lived in an orphanage into a family, and something he said really brought us up short. He told us he believed any child who had been in an orphanage for longer than eighteen months would be irreversibly psychologically damaged. They wouldn’t have experienced real nurturing, they wouldn’t have been picked up and held and loved enough, and that would affect them in a way they would never recover from. So we gave up trying to find a way to adopt Lev and Artem and, working with a charity in Ukraine, we concentrated on getting them out of there before their eighteen months was up. Their mother died, and their father went back to prison, but they had a relatively young grandmother and it was arranged that they should go and live with her.
Through the charity, we quietly provided them with financial support. We were advised to keep it anonymous – so anonymous that not even Lev and Artem’s grandmother would know we were helping – because of the way the media had descended on them: if they found out I was their benefactor, there was a chance they would never leave the kids alone. The help we gave wasn’t extravagant Elton John-scale support, which would have served only to isolate them more. But we made sure they had enough of the things that the charity told us they needed: decent furniture, food, books for school, legal support. When the Russians invaded that part of Ukraine, we worked with the same charity that had funded the orphanage to evacuate them to Kiev. We’ll always keep an eye on them.
Last year, when I went back to Ukraine with the AIDS Foundation, I saw Lev and Artem. They walked into the room in their matching hoodies and we hugged and cried and talked and talked. So much time had passed. Lev was grown up now. He was a funny, cheeky, charming ten-year-old. But in one way, nothing had changed at all: I still felt exactly the same connection to him as I had the day I first met him. I still wished we could have adopted him. But I knew his grandmother had done a great job.
* * *
We’d tried and failed to become adoptive parents. It was disheartening but, this time, the paternal feeling didn’t fade at all. It was like someone had jammed a switch on: I n
ow wanted to have kids as much as David. But it wasn’t a straight-forward process. Adoption was still incredibly tricky for a gay couple, and the other option, surrogacy, was pretty fraught too. Transactional surrogacy is technically against the law in the UK, although you can have a child in a country where it’s legal, then bring them back to live in Britain. We spoke to our doctor in California and were introduced to a company called California Fertility Partners. The process is incredibly convoluted: there are egg donor agencies and surrogacy agencies, and there are tricky legal processes involved, especially if you live abroad. The more we looked into it, the more complicated it seemed to become. After a while, my head was swimming with hormone therapies and blastocysts, embryo transfers and parenting orders and egg donors.
We were advised to find a surrogate who was unmarried – there were cases in the past of married surrogates’ husbands making a legal claim to the child even though they had no biological connection. We decided to both contribute to the sperm sample, so we wouldn’t know which one of us was the biological parent. We were advised that everything had to take place under a veil of strict secrecy. We were to remain anonymous to the surrogate, adopting the guise of Edward and James, an English gay couple who were vaguely described as ‘working in the entertainment business’, while everyone else involved had to be bound by strict legal non-disclosure agreements. Having recently received a powerful lesson in the benefits of keeping my mouth shut, I thought that made perfect sense. When the media had found out the identity of Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker’s surrogate, the poor woman had been forced into hiding: the last thing anyone wanted was an expectant mother being harassed by the press.