Sir Elton John’s mother tried to stop his civil partnership to David Furnish
The singer says his mother hated anyone being closer to him than she was
By Steve Brown
Words: Steve Brown
Sir Elton John’s mother tried to stop his civil partnership with David Furnish because she hated anyone being closer to him than she was.
The day after the Civil Partnership Act came into force in the UK back in 2005, the singer and his filmmaker partner were among the first couples to form a civil partnership and back in 2014, they married after marriage equality was brought into the UK.
But now, in his new memoir, ‘Me’, John reveals his mother, Sheila, tried to stop the couple from getting married and the singer believes it was because she was jealous of anyone getting close to him.
In an extract obtained by the Daily Mail, John wrote: “I didn’t find out what had provoked all this until much later. It turned out that David’s parents, who are Canadian, had known what the problem was all along, but hadn’t wanted to upset us.
“They’d rung Mum as soon as they arrived in the UK. They always got on well with her and Derf. They’d even been on holidays together.
“My mother told them 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.
“David’s mum told her she was nuts, that their kids were doing something amazing and she should support them.
“My mother put the phone down on her.
“She repeated the same line to me a couple of years later, in the middle of a blazing row. It didn’t make sense.
“Mum had always been incredibly hard work, but she had never been homophobic…
“As ever, I think the real problem was that she hated anyone being closer to me than she was…
“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.”