The New Yorker:

From 1996: Elton John, or how to survive twenty-five years at the top.

By Ian Parker

Like his hair and his personality, Elton John’s English country mansion has been refashioned in recent years. The room that was once a discothèque—mirrored ball, amyl nitrite, Village People—now has chintz sofas and deep carpets. The squash court has become a library. The games room has been cleared of rock-and-roll pinball machines and stuffed animals. The outdoor five-a-side football pitch (trimmed with Watford Football Club logos) has been dug up, and in its place is a formal Italian garden, designed by Sir Roy Strong, the former director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum; in it are hedges and little paths, and a twelve-foot obelisk that was mistakenly reported in the British tabloid press to be a thirty-foot statue of a penis, and also to be a possible distraction to air traffic at nearby Heathrow Airport.

No one would call this a house of restraint. Elton John, now forty-nine, does not binge, as he once did, on alcohol, cocaine, food, and spectacles. But he has found other ways of expressing what his former therapist described to me, not unreasonably, as a compulsive personality. Mick Jagger, visiting here recently, said, “I’ve never seen so much fucking porcelain. If I see one more piece of porcelain . . .” Porcelain is one of Elton’s current obsessions, as are flowers (his florists have no other clients) and modern black-and-white photographs (kept in his apartment in Atlanta). He also collects the work of Arthur Devis, the eighteenth, century English portraitist, who did his society subjects the favor of attaching their heads to dazzlingly fashionable clothes they had never owned or worn; it seems right that Elton John, who once played to five hundred thousand people in Central Park while dressed as Donald Duck, eats his lunch under paintings of people not fully at ease with their waistcoats.

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