Featured in ‘Rocketman,’ Reid was John’s lover and handled the pop star’s affairs for 28 years before an epic falling out.
As Elton John’s lover in the early 1970s, John Reid witnessed the rise of one of the world’s greatest entertainers. As John’s manager for 28 years, Reid amassed a fortune, reportedly indulging in lavish expenditures on trinkets, travel, clothing, and homes.
Reid is prominently featured in the musical fantasy film “Rocketman,” starring Taron Egerton as John and Richard Madden as Reid. (Reid was also portrayed by Aidan Gillen in the 2018 Queen and Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” due to his management of the British rock group in the mid-seventies.)
Reid says he ‘wasn’t enthusiastic’ when John asked him to be his manager
Born on September 9, 1949, Reid grew up in the Scottish town of Paisley, near Glasgow. The son of a welder and a shop worker, he briefly attended Stow College in Glasgow before moving to London in 1967. At 18, Reid entered the music business as a promoter for EMI. By 19, he was managing the Tamla Motown label for the U.K., and it was at a company Christmas party that 21-year-old Reid met 23-year-old John.
Their professional partnership lasted 28 years, with Reid being present for John’s career highs and lows, including his battles with alcohol and drug use, his marriage and divorce from Renate Blauel, his enduring partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin, numerous lawsuits, and loves lost and found.
“When I met Elton, I didn’t even realize his potential,” Reid is quoted as saying in Scotland’s Daily Record. “I’ve never claimed to have discovered him. In fact, when he suggested I should manage him, I wasn’t enthusiastic.” When Reid accepted the job of managing John at Dick James Music, the couple were already living together.
Reid and John were each other’s ‘first great’ loves
“[Elton] was my first great love, and I was his,” Reid said, according to the Scottish Daily Mail. Their first sexual encounter is portrayed in “Rocketman,” with John saying at the U.K. premiere of the film that when he and Reid “tear their clothes off in the movie, that was how it happened. It was in San Francisco.” John also revealed he was “a virgin until then. I was desperate to be loved, desperate to have a tactile relationship.”
Their relationship as lovers lasted from 1970 until 1975, a prolific music period for John marked by numerous international hits including “Your Song,” “Daniel,” “Candle in the Wind,” and “Rocket Man.” His persona and outfits became increasingly flamboyant. “The vast leaps in style were exhausting,” Reid has said of the period. “He would go out one day with brown hair and return the next with pink.”
According to Reid, the relationship ended because Elton had “never had a sexual adolescence. He needed to go off and play the field, which he did with gusto… There were no dramas.”
After their relationship ended, Reid continued to be John’s manager
Reid remained in John’s life – and as his business manager – until 1998. Over the decades, the two became wealthy from John’s recording and touring successes, both spending lavishly on sports cars, yachts, jewelry, and property. Reid managed Queen from 1975 to 1978 and other acts including Bros, Kiki Dee, Lionel Richie, Billy Connelly, and Michael Flatley.
Although it was not public knowledge at the time that the two were lovers, they made headlines in the seventies. Reid was sentenced to a month in prison in New Zealand in 1974 for knocking a journalist to the floor of a nightclub. He was also reportedly arrested in San Francisco in 1979 after hitting a hotel doorman with his cane. Reid allegedly beat another journalist the day after John’s wedding to Blauel in Sydney, Australia in 1984.
Like John, Reid struggled with drugs and alcohol and in 1991 checked into the same recovery clinic John had stayed at when he got sober in 1990. “Elton called me regularly. He was a tower of strength,” Reid told the Daily Record. But unlike John, Reid relapsed and continued to struggle with alcohol.
John says that Reid ‘betrayed’ him financially and sued his former manager
Their professional relationship ended in 1998, the same year John’s auditors discovered a reported £20 million gap in his accounts. Two years later, they faced each other in court, with John suing accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Andrew Haydon, director of John Reid Enterprises, for negligence and breach of duty. “I trusted him,” John said of Reid in court. “I never thought he would betray me but he has betrayed me.”
Reid had already paid the “Crocodile Rock” singer a reported £3.4 million in an out-of-court settlement before the court ruled against John.
The very public disintegration of their relationship also caused collateral damage in the form of an estrangement between John and his mother, Sheila Farebrother. She publicly blamed the split of the former friends and lovers on the advent of John’s partner David Furnish into the group and John’s insistence she cut ties with Reid and John’s former chauffeur Bob Halley. “I had no intention of dropping John and Bob and I told Elton so,” Farebrother said to the Daily Mail in 2015, the same year she and John reconciled. Farebrother died in 2017 at age 92.
Reid and John no longer speak
Reid continued in the music business until reportedly retiring in 1999, a year after divesting himself of an art collection allegedly worth £2 million. He was a judge on the Australian version of “The X Factor” in 2005 and has since lived a quiet life out of the public eye.
“I’m fond of Elton and proud of the work we did together,” Reid reportedly said in the mid-2010s. “One day I’ll bump into him and there may be hugs and kisses. Or maybe not.”
Though featured in two of the biggest music industry-based films of 2018 and 2019, Reid has never publicly discussed how he is portrayed in or commented on either “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Rocketman.” His current whereabouts are unknown, though reports list him as living in Australia or London.
