Elton John is talking about his turbulent relationship with his mother—and says he's "glad" she never met his two young sons, People reports. The singing legend opened up on CBS Sunday Morning about how his mother, Sheila Farebrother, didn't meet sons Zachary, 8, and Elijah, 6, before she died in 2017. "She never liked David. She never liked anybody. She never asked to see the children," says the 72-year-old. "But I'm glad they didn’t meet her, because she would have criticized them, like she criticized me. She couldn’t help herself. She's a sociopath." In other excerpts from the interview and his upcoming memoir, Me:
- How their relationship changed: "The only thing that changed was I didn’t lose my temper," he said on the CBS show. "I knew what was coming, and I let her get on with it. And I just said, 'I love you, Mum,' and she said, 'I love you, too. I don't like you, but I love you. But I don't like you.'"
- His regret over using cocaine: "It nearly destroyed my soul," he said. "My soul was black, like a charred piece of steak, until I said, 'I need help.' And suddenly a little pilot light in my soul came along going, 'Yes, I'm still here. I'm still here.'" (He's apparently been sober and clean for 29 years.)
- About the memoir: "I wanted my boys to know what I was like and what happened, so that when I’m not here, they can read the book and read the truth," he said.
- On celebrating his civil partnership with husband David Furnish: "I was as happy as I could ever remember being," he writes in Me. "And that was the moment my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath."
- Mom in the car: "Despite various entreaties to come into the house, they just sat there, stony-faced," he writes of Farebrother sitting in the car with his stepfather at the event. "There, 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."
- Her apparent motive: "She had never been homophobic," he writes. "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 tough of the umbilical cord finally being cut and she didn’t care about anything else, including the fact that I was finally happy."
Their rift got worse and they became fully estranged, but John says he continued to support her financially until her death. (See what John had to say to the media
about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.)
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