‘As if fate had brought us together’: the extraordinary friendship between Elton John and Graham Taylor
In September 1973, Elton John gave a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Afterwards, everybody who had been there felt able to agree on one thing – they’d never seen anything quite like it before. Decked out from head to toe in white feathers, he made his entrance down an enormous glittery staircase while the lids of five grand pianos rose, one after the other, to reveal the letters E-L-T-O-N. At the same time, 400 white doves fluttered into the night sky. Shortly after his new album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, had topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic – his third successive US number one – he set off on a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
By now Elton, at the age of 26, had become so successful his record company provided him with a personalised Boeing 707 to fly him from one concert to another. Yet however far he may have shot into the stratosphere, he remained every bit as obsessed with Watford Football Club as he had been in his youth.
Throughout the 1950s, whenever there was a home fixture, young Reggie Dwight and his father Stanley would go off to Vicarage Road, Watford’s home ground.
‘We always stood in the same place – we didn’t have enough money to sit down. But that was fine; I wanted to be right in the thick of things. After the game was over, I would just bounce all the way home, I felt so happy. It didn’t even worry me that much if we lost.’
But by 1974 Watford were in the Third Division, strapped for cash and losing on a regular basis. Shortly before leaving for Australia, Elton was interviewed by a journalist, a fellow Watford supporter, who mentioned that the club was in financial trouble. If he was sad to hear of the club’s plight, it hardly came as a big surprise: ‘The main reason they didn’t have any money was because no one was interested in coming to watch them lose each week.’
At supper one evening after the show, Elton told his agent Vic Lewis that what he wanted most of all was to join Watford’s board of directors. The problem was, he had no idea how to go about it.
Back in London, Lewis called up the football correspondent of the Watford Observer, Oli Phillips, to say Elton was thinking of putting on a concert to raise some money for the club. And perhaps even joining the Watford board.
Phillips said he thought these were excellent ideas, and duly arranged a meeting between Watford’s chairman, Jim Bonser, and Elton. Before the meeting, Elton was feeling more nervous than he had done since making his live debut in the US, four years earlier. ‘Just going into the board room at Watford was extraordinary for me. Although I could see the place was absolutely horrible, it still felt like a religious experience. I can remember looking through the window and seeing the place where I used to stand as a boy. That was an incredibly romantic feeling. But there was also something very nourishing about it; a feeling that I was closing a circle in a way, going back to when I was a child.’
Braced for a chilly reception, he found that Bonser and his fellow directors couldn’t have been friendlier. ‘Although I had huge eight-inch platforms on and green hair, everyone was very warm and welcoming. That really took me aback.’
By the time the meeting ended, Elton John had been made a vice-president of Watford FC, with all the attendant benefits: a ticket to every home game and unrestricted access to the cold buffet.
On 5 May 1974, he played a concert in aid of Watford FC at Vicarage Road, topping a bill that included his friend and fellow football fanatic Rod Stewart. Elton had hoped to appear dressed as the club’s mascot, Harry the Hornet – back in 1959 Watford had changed their colours from blue and white to gold and black – but unable to find a hornet costume, he arrived dressed as a giant bee instead.
Not even a sudden cloudburst could dampen anyone’s spirit. As the skies opened, Elton led a rapturous crowd in a chorus of Singin’ in the Rain.
A few days later, Oli Phillips presented Jim Bonser with a cheque for ￡35,000. Not unreasonably, Phillips had expected some expression of gratitude. Bonser, however, was not impressed. ‘I was hoping for ￡10,000 more,’ he told him. The money went towards much needed repairs to the Main Stand, as well as poisoning the large colony of rats that lived beneath it.
Now that Elton was on the board, his passion for the club was more intense than ever. In the spring of 1975, on the day that Watford were playing their last match of the season, he ran into a record shop in New York asking if he could use their phone to call home. Learning that Watford had just been beaten 3-2 by Walsall – a result that sent them back down to the Fourth Division once again – he immediately sat on the floor and burst into tears.
A year later, Jim Bonser decided that he was too old, tired and fed up to continue as club chairman. He offered to sell Elton the club outright – or rather give it to him if Elton agreed to settle the club’s debts of around ￡200,000, more than a million pounds in today’s terms.
In the event, Elton practically bit his arm off. ‘I didn’t need to think about it, not for a moment. I was so keen to accept.’ Watford may have been one of the worst teams in the Football League, but that brought out Elton’s competitive streak.
‘I remember when I took over telling the board that I wanted to take Watford into the First Division. They all looked at me as if I was stark staring mad.’
Possibly there was another factor that made him so keen to buy Watford – though he didn’t become aware of it until much later. ‘Perhaps my father was at the back of it somewhere. Perhaps I wanted to do something to mark all the great times I’d had there as a kid.’
Not that Elton had even told Stanley Dwight when he bought the club. They barely ever communicated, still less saw one another. Nor did he have any idea how his father felt when he heard the news.
Others were much less restrained in their reactions. His manager was incandescent when he heard, suspecting – quite rightly – that Elton’s involvement with Watford was going to take up time when he could have been touring or recording.
‘Everyone was saying, “It’s a rich man’s indulgence, a five-minute wonder” and all the rest of it. They also seemed to have this idea that if you were a rock star, you were somehow stupid. That everything must have fallen into your lap. But these people didn’t have any idea how hard I’d worked.’
And there was another factor, too. ‘None of them actually knew me. When I set my heart on something, I commit to it 100 per cent. I never gave a monkey’s about the press anyway; all I cared about was getting the fans and the community on side. As far as I was concerned, everyone else could go screw themselves.’
Now that the club was owned by a rock star, there were those who felt that it was time to ditch Z Cars as their theme tune and adopt one of their new chairman’s songs instead. Elton, however, wouldn’t consider it. ‘I never wanted my music played at the club; that would have been far too egotistical.
‘Becoming chairman of Watford meant far more to me than being famous. I may have become Elton John, but I was fulfilling Reggie’s dreams. And in a way being chairman of Watford meant I could go back to being Reggie again, at least for a while. I felt like the greatest man on earth.’
While there was no shortage of rumours about Elton’s private life, in public he had discreetly sought to fan the flames of heterosexuality. When he went to a game at Vicarage Road, he often took a young woman along – partly for company and partly to dampen down any rumours.
Then, in October 1976, Elton gave an interview to Rolling Stone. Having fulfilled his ambition of becoming chairman of Watford, there was something else he craved: ‘I desperately would like to have an affair. I’d rather fall in love with a woman because I think a woman probably lasts much longer than a man. But I really don’t know… I haven’t met anybody that I would like to settle down with – of either sex.
‘It’s going to be terrible with my football club; it’s so hetero, it’s unbelievable. But I mean, who cares! I just think people should be very free with sex – although they should draw the line at goats.’ The interview sent the tabloid press into a frenzy. ‘Elton Swings Both Ways!’ read one headline; ‘Rocketman Draws Line at Goats!’ read another.
After the stories about his bisexuality appeared, the Watford manager, Mike Keen, asked to see him. ‘The team and I have read what it says in the papers,’ Keen told him, ‘and we don’t care. You are our chairman and we love you.’
Elton was deeply touched. But while there was no questioning Keen’s qualities as a man, his abilities as a manager were coming under increasing scrutiny. By the early summer of 1977 Keen was sacked, just before a home game against Huddersfield. Much to everyone’s amazement, possibly including Keen’s, Watford won the game 2-0, despite having two players sent off.
All that remained to be decided was who would take his place. ‘What I wanted above all was someone young and hungry and inspirational. Someone who wasn’t just going to splash my money about. You can’t just go out and buy a team – that’s always a disaster. You have to build it from the ground upwards.’
Elton called the England manager, Don Revie, and asked him who was the best young manager in the lower divisions. Revie didn’t even have to think about it. ‘Graham Taylor,’ he said immediately.
The first time that Elton met Graham at his home in Berkshire, Elton was stricken with nerves: ‘I was so intimidated that I felt sick. I wasn’t even sure what to say. I knew I shouldn’t talk about money because I was sure he would have told me to f—k off straight away. Besides, that wasn’t what it was about; it was about selling the club and my dreams for the club. I can remember thinking, how am I going to convince this guy to come to a rundown s—thole like Watford? What was he going to make of me? He was probably going to think I was a complete tosser.’
At the time, Elton was one of the most flamboyant men on the planet, while Graham was quite possibly one of the most conventional. But right from the moment the two of them started talking, Elton became aware that something unusual was going on. ‘There was something magical about it, something almost spiritual. It really was as if fate had brought us together.’ The only time it had ever happened to him before was when he met Bernie Taupin in 1967. ‘I had exactly the same sort of feeling with Graham as I’d done when I met Bernie – that it was somehow meant to be.’
They soon realised they were both as passionate as they were driven. ‘That was the thing above all that we had in common: passion. My philosophy about football was that above all it should be entertaining. It’s just like going to a concert; the last thing people want is to be bored. Graham felt exactly the same way; that was why he wanted his teams to attack the whole time.’
And then Elton went a step further. ‘I’d like to get into Europe,’ he told Graham. Now it was Graham’s turn to fall off his chair. At the time, only the top two clubs in the First Division qualified to play European football. The likelihood of Watford – back once again in the lower reaches of the Fourth Division – ever being in a position to do so seemed about as remote as them flying to the moon.
‘OK…’ Graham said in as measured a voice as he could muster. ‘Well, what do you think it will cost to do that?’
‘Well, what do you think it will cost?’ Elton wanted to know.
There was no point in being mealy-mouthed, Graham decided. Far better to scare him off with an enormous figure
than try to pretend it could be done on the cheap. ‘I don’t think you’ll get much change out of a million pounds,’ he said.
Elton didn’t hesitate. ‘Right, we’ll give it a go,’ he said – and then he stretched out his hand. With his head still reeling, Graham shook it.
While Graham made himself busy instilling the virtues of restraint and self-discipline into the Watford players, Elton’s life was heading rapidly in the opposite direction. At a televised concert he gave in Edinburgh, he topped up his glass at frequent intervals from a large jug of Bloody Mary on the piano in front of him.
‘I don’t want people at home to think I’m an alcoholic,’ he told the audience. ‘I want them to know I’m an alcoholic.’
By now he was living at Woodside, a large 1920s Queen Anne-style house in Old Windsor. He had loved the property from the moment he saw it, but as the pressures of fame mounted, he spent more and more time on his own. For all his popularity, he had few close friends and – as he had already learned from experience – scarcely anyone he could trust.
‘Quite a lot of people I thought were my friends had talked to the press. I’d even taken to keeping a little black book in which I noted down the names of everyone who had betrayed me.’
And that wasn’t all. ‘I just felt lost. I’d dress up in these outrageous clothes and become Elton John, but once I came off stage it felt very different. I never brought the Elton persona home; he just stayed on the side of the stage. Then I’d come back here and just rattle around by myself. It didn’t help that everyone I knew seemed to be famous, or in the music industry. I didn’t know any ordinary people – people who would treat me as if I was normal. In my world, no one dared confront me because I was king.’
Yet there was one place where no one would fawn over him, or treat him like a creature from another planet. Just as his bedroom in Pinner Hill Road had been Elton’s sanctuary when he was a child, so Watford Football Club became the only place where he felt safe and secure.
‘It was a lifeline back to my childhood. When I went to Watford, I felt I could leave Elton behind for a while. I’d go to the Supporters’ Club and have a drink and chat to people about football, and I never felt any pressure to be someone I wasn’t. No one cared about who I was, or my sexuality, and no one bowed and scraped. I enjoyed myself far more there than I did anywhere else. The ridiculous thing was that I felt more at home at Watford Football Club than I did in my own home.’
The trouble was these moments of warmth and security lasted only so long. At the end of the evening, Elton would get into his chauffeur-driven Bentley, and go back to his enormous house with only the staff and an ever-increasing number of possessions for company. He was now the owner of nine cars including a Ferrari and an Aston Martin DB5, one of the world’s largest collections of Fabergé eggs, along with the dress worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.
To fill the hours that he spent alone, Elton was not only drinking more and more, but taking increasing amounts of drugs – mainly, but by no means exclusively, cocaine. ‘I used to shut myself away in my bedroom, sometimes for days on end. I was always an isolationist drinker and drug-taker, so no one else knew about it – not at first, anyway. I was lonely, that was the truth. Lonely and confused.’
Although Elton didn’t want anyone to find out just how much cocaine he was taking, the person whose disapproval he most dreaded incurring was that of Watford’s new manager.
Graham Taylor always maintained that he had no idea Elton was gay when they first met. ‘We never talked about it, not once,’ Elton recalls. ‘Graham certainly wasn’t homophobic; it just wasn’t a necessary thing to bring up. That never bothered me in the slightest; I always felt that he loved me for who I was.’
In September 1978, the pair travelled north to watch Watford play Rotherham – a game Watford lost 2-1. Usually Elton loved going to Watford away games. Ever since childhood, forever rooting for the underdog, he’d believed that the real spirit of football could only be found in the little clubs, with their loyal cluster of fans, their quagmire pitches and their crumbling stands. ‘That was where you saw people playing for the sheer love of the game, with no thought of ego or money. The clubs would be run by local businessmen. In Grimsby, they would all be in the fish trade; in Workington, they were potato farmers. In York, there was even a coal fire in the boardroom; the whole thing was very Dickensian.’
But this occasion was to prove rather different. After the game was over, Elton and Graham walked into the club bar where they found the Rotherham directors, almost as unused to victory as Watford had once been, in a state of high exultation.
Elton had taken the defeat particularly badly and went off to the toilet to sit in one the cubicles until he had calmed down. While he was in there, two of the Rotherham directors came in. As they stood at the urinals, he heard one say to the other, ‘Well, we showed that poof today, didn’t we?’
Although he usually let everything slide off him, on this occasion the men’s casual homophobia and tone of quiet smugness infuriated Elton. When he emerged from the toilet, Graham had never seen him look so angry. At first Elton wanted to go and confront the two men responsible. However, Graham persuaded him not to. There was no point in letting them know they had hurt him, he said. If he did that, it would simply confirm all their prejudices: ‘Instead of thinking of you as a poof, they’ll think of you as a poof and a bad loser.’
Possibly he might have phrased this better, Graham thought later. Even so, he was convinced that provoking a confrontation would be a mistake. They went over to where the Rotherham directors were sitting, stuck out their hands and, in the most sincere-sounding tones they could muster, offered their congratulations and said that the best team had won. They then walked away, noting, with satisfaction, the air of considerable puzzlement they left in their wake.
Whenever Elton was away on tour, he would still try to be back for the Watford board meetings. And if he couldn’t make it, he would often arrange for the entire board to fly to wherever he was, then hold the meeting in his hotel room. All this, of course, was a far cry from what the club’s directors had been used to. Perhaps not surprisingly, they tended to treat Elton rather differently from their former chairman. ‘I was the cash machine, so I’m sure that influenced how they treated me.’
At the same time, he’d made it plain from the beginning that he wasn’t the possessor of a bottomless wallet. ‘I never promised anything I couldn’t deliver and everyone knew that whatever money I gave them, I was going to have to go out and work for.’
As for Graham, his dislike of spending any more of Elton’s cash than he considered strictly necessary verged on the pathological. ‘There was never any sense that I was the golden egg and Graham wanted more of my money. Quite the reverse; he wasn’t remotely greedy. I could see how much he hated to ask for anything, and when he did buy a player, he made sure that he always got him for the best possible price.’
And if someone couldn’t make up his mind whether to come to Watford, Graham knew he had a colossal ace up his sleeve. ‘He used to say to me, “Give this bloke a ring, will you, and try to persuade him to come?”’
Elton loved this more than anything else. ‘I adore talking to footballers, and it was so exciting. I’d never had that before.’ As Graham had anticipated, hearing Elton on the other end of the line tended to have an electrifying effect on any doubters.
By this point Elton had been chairman of Watford for two years. As well as becoming a kind of home from home, Vicarage Road had given him a feeling of belonging that he hadn’t found anywhere else. But he had another reason to feel excited. There was a growing sense at the club that all the new elements were starting to come together. That, after decades stuck in the doldrums, the wind finally was at Watford’s backs.
Extracted from Watford Forever: How Graham Taylor and Elton John Saved a Football Club, a Town and Each Other, by John Preston in collaboration with Elton John (Viking, ￡22), out 16 November. To pre-order, visit books.telegraph.co.uk