Elton John says Michael Jackson was a ‘disturbing person to be around’
Elton John and Michael Jackson. (Marc Piasecki/Getty and Gianfranco Calcagno/FilmMagic)
Elton John has said in his new memoir Me that the late Michael Jackson was a “disturbing person to be around”.
Jackson passed away in 2009, but according to The Independent, John wrote that he and Michael were friendly early on in his career.
He said: “I’d known Michael since he was 13 or 14… He was just the most adorable kid you could imagine.”
But writing about their encounters later on in Jackson’s life, he said: “At some point in the intervening years, he started sequestering himself away from the world, and away from reality the way Elvis Presley did.
“God knows what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles.
“I don’t mean that in the light-hearted way. He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around.
“It was incredibly sad, but he was someone you couldn’t help: he was just gone, off in a world of his own, surrounded by people who only told him what he wanted to hear.”
Elton John: Michael Jackson ‘couldn’t cope with adult company’.
John wrote about the time he and his now husband, David Furnish, invited Jackson to a dinner party, but he refused to eat and eventually wandered off.
They eventually found him hours later with John’s housekeeper in her cottage, playing video games with her 11-year-old son.
He added: “For whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to cope with adult company at all.”
In another excerpt from the book, John said that his mother tried to stop his civil partnership with David Furnish from happening because she was jealous. He wrote that on the day she arrived “in character as a raving sociopath”.
Me by Elton John was published on Tuesday October 15 by Macmillan.
