In the late Eighties, I fell in love with a guy called Hugh Williams, who lived in Atlanta, Georgia. One day, he had some news for me: he was sick of drinking and taking drugs, and he’d decided to go into rehab.
I went ballistic, screaming, shouting, saying the most hurtful things I could think of. Afterwards, I holed up alone in a rented house in London for two weeks, snorting cocaine and drinking whisky.
On the rare occasions when I ate, I made myself sick immediately afterwards. I wouldn’t answer the phone. I wouldn’t answer the door. I didn’t wash, I didn’t get dressed. It was sordid. Awful.
Eventually, I realised that if I carried on for a couple more days, I’d either overdose or have a heart attack. I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t want to die.
Drink problem: Elton in the Seventies
I called Hugh, who agreed to meet, but only in the presence of his counsellor.
The next day, I was in a tiny hotel room in America, facing Hugh. The counsellor had told us both to make a list of things we didn’t like about each other and then read it out.
I went first.
I said that I didn’t like the fact that Hugh was untidy. He left his clothes everywhere, and didn’t put CDs back in their cases.
Then it was Hugh’s turn. I noticed he was shaking. ‘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.’
There was a long pause. He clearly thought I was going to explode again.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘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.’
Getting help wasn’t straightforward, as I needed to be treated for three addictions at once: cocaine, alcohol and food. On July 29, 1990, I ended up in the only place I could find that would take me — an ordinary general hospital in Chicago, with a view over a shopping-centre car park.
A consultant 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 drugs and booze.
The first days were tough: I couldn’t sleep, I had panic attacks, suffered from mood swings, felt ill all the time and lonely. 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 got to the stage where I shaved and I wiped my a***, and paid other people to do everything else for me.
I had no idea how to work a washing-machine and had to ask another patient, Peggy, to show me. After she realised I wasn’t joking, she was helpful, but that didn’t change the fact that I was a 43-year-old man who didn’t know how to clean his own clothes.
But, for me, the worst 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 saying that Aids was God’s judgment on homosexuals.
That afternoon in Chicago, I stormed out of the meeting, packed my bag and left. I got as far as a bench outside and burst into tears.
I could easily make some phone calls and get out of here, but where to? Back to London? To do what? Sit around in a dressing-gown covered in vomit, doing coke all day? I lugged my suitcase sheepishly back into the hospital.
Eventually, I started making 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.
Group meetings — in which we were told to talk about our worst, dirtiest secrets — 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 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. Being honest was freeing. You got rid of all the baggage that came with lying: the embarrassment, the shame.
After six weeks, I was ready to leave. I spent some time in Atlanta with Hugh, but our relationship had begun to peter out.
For most of the next 18 months I was in London, where I settled into a quiet routine.
I lived alone. I didn’t bother employing staff; I liked doing things myself. I got a dog from Battersea Dogs Home, a little mutt called Thomas.
Every day, I’d get up at 6.30am and take Thomas for a walk. It’s a cliché to say that a recovering addict notices things about his surroundings that he never saw while he was using — the beauty of flowers, the wonders of nature — but it’s only a cliché because it’s true.
After the dog was walked, I spent most of my time at meetings.
Once, I skipped a meeting to go to a Watford game — and when my sponsor rang from America, I told him what I’d done.
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 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. Sometimes, I went to three or four meetings a day. In three years, I went to about 1,400 of them.
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.
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.
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’d think, ‘That’s insane’. But then I’d remember how I’d been a few months before — drunk and unwashed at 10am, doing a line of coke every five minutes — and realised they must have thought exactly the same about me.
Some people really struggle when they come out of addiction, but I was the opposite. I was elated.
Every morning, I was just happy to wake up without feeling like s***. I never felt like having a line, and I still 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 — from 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 — because, quite frankly, it’s a drug that makes people act like a*******s. I wish I’d realised that 45 years ago.
Elton Uncensored: Katharine Hepburn hopped into my life
The most interesting person I knew in Virginia Water in Surrey — where I bought a bungalow with John Reid in 1972 — had nothing to do with the music business.
At that time, the film-maker Bryan Forbes owned a bookshop, and we met when I walked in one day. He introduced himself and said he thought he recognised me.
Pals: Katharine and Bryan
As the conversation progressed, it became increasingly apparent that he thought I was one of the Bee Gees. Still, once we’d established I wasn’t a Gibb brother, we got on very well.
One summer Sunday afternoon, John and I were sitting outside the bungalow having a snack, when we noticed a 60-something lady who looked a little like Katharine Hepburn cycling up our drive.
It was Katharine Hepburn: ‘I’m staying with Bryan Forbes — he said it would be OK if I used your pool.’
John and I just nodded, dumbstruck. Five minutes later, she reappeared in a swimsuit, complaining there was a dead frog in the pool.
While I dithered about how to get it out — I’m a bit squeamish — she just jumped in and grabbed it with her hand.
I asked her how she could bear to touch it.
‘Character, young man,’ she said, nodding sternly.
Elton Uncensored: Bob Dylan is a disaster at party games
Towards the end of the Eighties, I held an insane party in LA, and invited everyone I knew. By mid-evening, I was flying, absolutely out of my mind, when a scruffy-looking guy I didn’t recognise wandered into the lit-up garden.
Who the hell was he? 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 my PA saying: ‘Elton, that’s not the gardener. It’s Bob Dylan.’
Coked out of my brain and keen to make amends, I rushed over, 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!’
Scruffy: Elton’s party guest Bob Dylan
Dylan 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.
Given that one of my recent looks had involved teaming a pink suit and a straw boater topped with a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, you couldn’t really blame him.
Another time, I invited Dylan to dinner with Simon and Garfunkel, and afterwards we played charades.
At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about Simon and Garfunkel is that they were better than Dylan.
He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘How many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he couldn’t seem to tell you whether a word had one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymed with!
He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning by a friend.
That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling — do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.
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TOMORROW: Hair-raising truth about my transplants