Elton John would not sacrifice sex for a PG-13 rating—not in life, and not in Rocketman, the musical biopic starring Taron Egerton. “Everyone knows I had quite a lot of [sex and drugs] during the ’70s and ’80s,” John explained in The Guardian this month. “So there didn’t seem to be much point in making a movie that implied that after every gig, I’d quietly gone back to my hotel room with only a glass of warm milk and the Gideon’s Bible for company.”
Following last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody—which downplayed Freddie Mercury’s notoriously prolific sex life—Rocketman’s unapologetic love scene between Elton John and his first boyfriend, John Reid (Richard Madden), delighted Cannes Film Festival audience members. And even though John and Reid ended up having a nasty, public falling-out—more on that later—John himself was thrilled to see his first major sexual encounter, at the age of 23, re-created onscreen.
“I was a virgin until then,” John has explained of the 1970 encounter with Reid, who would become his manager. “I was desperate to be loved and desperate to have a tactile relationship...When they tear their clothes off in the movie, that was how it happened. It was in San Francisco.... I’m so glad it’s in there, because I am a gay man and I didn’t want to airbrush it under the carpet. This is who I am, and I was so joyous. When he is lying in my arms and I’m sitting back with a smile, I’m thinking, ‘Ah, I’m normal, I’ve had sex’.... That night was a very, very important part.”
Tom Doyle, who wrote the book Captain Fantastic, about John’s career through the ’70s, further explained: “It took Reid to confirm Elton’s sexual proclivities. Returning from a highly significant night with the Scot in San Francisco, he admitted to [music producer] Steve Brown, ‘I’m definitely gay’.... It was wholly liberating for Elton, at the relatively late age of twenty-three, to finally accept the true nature of his sexuality. Bravely, he didn’t attempt to keep it hidden from those closest to him.”
In real life, the chemistry had not been as immediate for John and Reid—a Scottish music wunderkind who had first run into John, according to Doyle, at EMI’s London office, where John was “cheekily scroung[ing] free vinyl copies of the latest releases.” Reid later told the Scottish Daily Mail about his first impression of John: “I remember this hip, shy young man,” he recalled. “There was a gawky sweetness about him.”
After the San Francisco trip, John and Reid moved into a flat in London together. “He was my first great love, and I was his,” Reid said. John’s producer Gus Dudgeon explained to VH1’s Behind the Music that the two were “in many ways the perfect combination...Both [were] gay...both very up for spending money, partying, having a really good time.”
Reid had signed on to be John’s manager, even though he was admittedly inexperienced in that area of the industry. According to Captain Fantastic, John’s boss at DJM saw the perk of the arrangement: “Who else can we rely on to get Elton out of bed in the morning than the guy he’s in bed with?” Reid was confident and had killer instincts, however: the following year, he launched his own management company, and went on to negotiate unprecedented deals for John. (Later, the manager would reportedly lament how excessive they were—wondering whether he helped make the music industry “more vulgar.”)
But boy, did John and Reid know how to spend money. According to a 1974 Rolling Stone cover story, John bought Reid an Appaloosa racehorse and a powerboat for his 25th birthday. For John’s birthday, Reid said he reciprocated by walking into a Paris jeweler and picking out the largest emerald ring he could find—allegedly worth a million francs.
Given that John and Reid were inseparable and living together, there was public speculation about the nature of their relationship. But when John was asked point-blank by Rolling Stone in 1974, he claimed Reid was “just my manager.... I have a close circle of friends who just aren’t in the public—sort of like Elvis and his...motorbike people. They were the people who first gave Bernie [Taupin] and me encouragement. It’s very much a family. That’s why it’s so incestuous sometimes.”
Reid was fiercely loyal to John, but also a bit of a hothead—with Rolling Stone devoting a paragraph to Reid’s history of violent antics: “He tossed a glass of champagne at a man for not having enough liquor at a reception for Elton; slapped a woman journalist who scolded him and reportedly called him a ‘poof’ (meaning a gay); and he beat and kicked another journalist whom he said he heard had threatened Elton.” He was also sentenced to a month in prison in 1974 for assaulting a journalist in New Zealand.
John and Reid’s romantic relationship fizzled out in 1975—with both men claiming the relationship ended for different reasons. According to Reid, John “never had a sexual adolescence. He needed to go off and play the field.” But according to Captain Fantastic, John said that Reid had been “more unfaithful than I liked.”
Their working relationship continued until 1998—the same year that John’s auditors discovered a £20 million gap in his accounts, and shortly before John sued both PricewaterhouseCoopers and Andrew Haydon, the former managing director of John Reid Enterprises. Speaking about his ex, John said, “I trusted him...I never thought he would betray me, but he has betrayed me.” While Reid settled with John out of court, a high-court hearing examined John’s excessive spending over the years—with a judge ultimately siding with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Haydon.
“Sir Elton’s indifference to the details of financial and business matters was for a long time compounded by the fact that he had serious problems with alcohol and drug abuse,” the judge determined, according to The Guardian. During the lead-up to the judgment, the court heard how John spent nearly £40 million during a 20-month period, and £293,000 on flowers alone. Reid alleged, meanwhile, that living with John was like “trying to hold back a racehorse...The vast leaps in style were exhausting. He would go out one day with brown hair and return the next with pink. One day he drove off in his Escort, and I said it wasn’t very rock and roll. He returned that afternoon with a purple Aston Martin.” (In Rocketman, shopping is the one addiction John cops to having not overcome.)
Richard Madden has said that, while preparing to play Reid, he reached out to various friends of the now-retired manager—including Donatella Versace. (Madden told Elle that the designer told him, “The thing about John Reid was that he was never wrong.”) But Reid, who is reportedly living in Australia under the radar these days, remains something of an enigma to Madden.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Madden explained: “Everyone has a very different take and a very different story about him.... You’ve got some people that are absolutely terrified of him, because he’s this man who loves to fire people and there’s this force, and then other people saying he is the most fun person you could possibly get, and if you get a night out with John Reid, you’re going to have the best time.” The contradictory reports, Madden explained, “gave me liberty to play lots of different elements of him. This man that people love being around, but also this man that people are absolutely terrified of; I got to play with the spectrum of that because of all these different anecdotes I got.”
In an Interview conversation with John, Madden said, “There’s lots about John Reid that’s not very likable. It was really fun to play with that and be a cunt sometimes.” John added, of the task of portraying his ex: “You have to be both tender and a bastard.”
In spite of the relationship’s ups and downs, Reid has seemed remorseful about its climactic final act. “It’s very sad that the long relationship I had with Elton has ended this way,” Reid told The Guardian in 2001, shortly after the court ruling. “I feel that the question mark that has been hanging over my integrity for the past three years has been removed, and that was the most important thing to me in this case. It should never have come to trial. It was ill advised.” In the years since, Reid appeared briefly as a judge on The X Factor in Australia, and told friends of a plan to write a memoir. Several years back, according to the Scottish Daily Mail, Reid even made comments suggesting he might be open to a reconciliation with John. “I’m fond of Elton, and proud of the work I did with him,” he said. “One day I’ll bump into him and there may be hugs and kisses. Or maybe not.”
