Photo: Andrew H. Walker/Getty
As a superstar, he earned both from millions, but there was one person he never felt he got it from — his father, Stanley. Their difficult relationship formed the emotional core of the"based on a true fantasy" biopic,Rocketman. “I never had his approval,” John said of his father in a 2008 interview with PEOPLE. “My mother had letters from him saying, ‘He’ll never become a star.’ … He instilled in me the drive to become who I am.”
Born on March 25, 1947, in the sleepy London suburb of Pinner, young Reggie spent much of his early life in fear of Stanley, a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force who would remain a cold and distant presence in his life. “I was afraid of my father. I was walking on eggshells the whole time,“he toldRolling Stonein 2016. Rare moments of physical contact between father and son usually took the form of beatings and made the shy boy even more reserved. “He was a very unhappy, lonely only child,” John’s husband, David Furnish, told PEOPLE.
In later years, John would recall his father forbidding him from wearing anything too far out, including decidedly unfunky boots called Hush Puppies. It would fuel his desire to break away and be his own person. “His condescension about what I was doing drove me on,” John told PEOPLE in 1974.
It’s a characterization that John’s estranged half-brother, Geoff Dwight, has rejected. “When I was growing up, Elton was always there and we had a lot of fun on family holidays and things like that,“he told theTimesin 2011. “He would come up and visit us almost every weekend and with him being older it was always exciting to hear the stories of what he had been up to.” Stanley’s second wife, Edna, echoed the sentiment in aninterview with theDaily Mail. “Stanley’s been made out as an overbearing monster. But it’s just not true. He was a lovely man, a good father and a loving husband.”
Geoff recalled a 1973 visit (alluded to in 2019’sRocketman) during which John gave the family a 2,000 pound check to buy a new car. The generous act had an unintended downside when the car proved too expensive to maintain, leading Stanley to reportedly sell it a short time later. Geoff speculated that this sewed the seeds of further resentment between father and son. “Was it this that led Elton, three years later, to give an interview in which he pilloried his father, claiming that he cadged new cars from him?”
Most hurtful to the superstar, John has said on multiple occasions that his father failed to attend a single one of his shows. “My dad never came to see me and it really hurt. It still does,“he told Australian journalist Molly Medrum in 2012. “I just wanted him to see that I was really good. But it never happened.” (Edna, for her part,has claimedthat they “went to listen to him many times.")
Sadly, the pair were never able to fully mend their relationship before Stanley’s death in 1991. John, not wanting to appear a “hypocrite,” didn’t attend the funeral. “In the end, he was proud of me,” he admitted to PEOPLE in 2008. But he still bears the scars of their troubled bond. “He’s been dead for a long time, and I’m still trying to prove things to him,” John toldRolling Stone. “I still do things and say, ‘Dad, you would’ve loved this.’ "
source: people.com
