One of the best things about celebrity memoirs is they always have crazy stories about other celebrities in them. Hell, Quincy Jones didn’t even write a memoir and he told everyone Marlon Brando fucked Richard Pryor. So what sort of crazy s**t is going to be in Elton John’s memoir?
For starters, as reported by The Independent, he thought Michael Jackson was a crazy person, and not in a fun way.
“I’d known Michael since he was 13 or 14,” John writes, explaining that they met after one of his shows in Philadelphia. “Elizabeth Taylor had turned up on the Starship with him in tow. He was just the most adorable kid you could imagine. But at some point in the intervening years, he started sequestering himself away from the world, and away from reality the way Elvis Presley did.”
“God knows what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles. I don’t mean that in the light-hearted way. He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around. It was incredibly sad, but he was someone you couldn’t help: he was just gone, off in a world of his own, surrounded by people who only told him what he wanted to hear.”
That’s ignorant! it’s a testament to South Park that the catchphrase they gave their Jackson caricature was based on something he actually said that people didn’t know he said.
John had a specific story about Jackson, too.
Jackson “looked awful”, John says, and wouldn’t eat anything served at the party, or anything served by his own chef.
“After a while, he got up from the table without a word and disappeared. We finally found him, two hours later, in a cottage in the grounds of Woodside where my housekeeper lived: she was sitting there, watching Michael Jackson quietly playing video games with her 11-year-old son. For whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to cope with adult company at all.”
That’s incredibly on-brand for Michael Jackson, sneaking out of a dinner party for a little alone time with an 11-year-old boy. You know, because he fucked kids. Or not, but who cares, you can’t defame the dead so feel free to say Michael Jackson was a child molester all you want, even if you don’t believe it.
To be fair, I would probably rather play video games than attend some Downton Abbey party at Elton John’s house with all the help downstairs.