Elton John revealed that his mother Sheila Eileen Dwight tried to stop his civil partnership ceremony with David Furnish from happening in his upcoming memoir Me.
“The first sign of something wrong was when she arrived at Woodside with (my stepfather) Derf and wouldn’t get out of the car,” he wrote about the day that was on December 21, 2005. “Despite various entreaties to come into the house, they just sat there, stony-faced.”
“Then mum announced she wouldn’t be joining the convoy of cars setting off for Windsor, nor would she be coming to the private lunch afterwards,” he continued. “And with that, she and Derf suddenly drove off.”
“The most important day of my life and one of mum’s moods appeared to be upon us, the ones I’d lived in terror of when I was young.”
Her bad behavior continued throughout the day, according to the “Bennie and the Jets” singer, saying that she talked “very loudly” while the couple exchanged vows.
Sheila allegedly didn’t want their civil partnership to be recognized at all. “My mother told them (David’s parents) they all had to work together to stop the civil partnership going ahead. She didn’t approve of two men ‘getting married’, as she put it.”
“Everyone she’d spoken to was horrified by the very idea. It was going to hurt my career… It didn’t make sense,” he continued. “Mum had always been incredibly hard work, but she had never been homophobic.”
Then, the Grammy winner had an epiphany: was his mother, in fact, jealous? “As ever, I think the real problem was that she hated anyone being closer to me than she was,” he wrote.
“She knew my boyfriends were never going to turn into a long-term relationship: I was too erratic because of all the cocaine I was taking back then. She knew my first marriage (to Renate Blauel) wouldn’t last because I was gay. But now I was sober and settled with a man I was deeply in love with. I’d found a life partner, and the civil partnership underlined that.”
“She couldn’t cope with the thought of the umbilical cord finally being cut and she didn’t care about anything else, including the fact that I was finally happy.”
Sheila died on December 4, 2017 at the age of 92. Elton shared a touching tribute to her on Instagram the same day.
“So sad to say that my mother passed away this morning,” he captioned next to a photo of them together. “I only saw her last Monday and I am in shock. Travel safe Mum. Thank-you for everything. I will miss you so much. Love, Elton.”
Elton’s memoir Me will be released on Tuesday, October 15.