Being the significant other of music superstar Elton John is not the easiest thing to deal with.
This is the lesson John learned when his husband David Furnish began struggling with alcoholism. John and Furnish entered a civil partnership in 2005 and got married in 2014.
“I always thought David had slipped into Elton John World with remarkable ease and confidence,” John writes in his new book Me, per DailyMail. “It turned out that a lot of things I was completely used to living with, that I just saw as a fact of life, made him completely anxious.”
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“He didn’t like being photographed all the time, or being under press scrutiny, or public speaking at AIDS Foundation events,” John continues.
John began noticing Furnish’s problematic drinking habits after he found empty wine bottles scattered throughout their shared homes around the world. The “Rocket Man” singer even once found Furnish passed out in front of a computer.
“It all came to a head in Los Angeles in 2014, two days before I was due to start a US tour,” John writes. “David was feeling low and wanted me to stay the extra night with him. I said no. We had a huge row, I went anyway.”
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“The next morning, David called and we had a row that made the previous day’s row look like a light-hearted disagreement over what to have for lunch,” he adds. “The kind of argument where you come off the phone teary and reeling, where things are said that make you wonder whether the next time you communicate it’ll be through lawyers.”
“In fact, the next time I heard from David, he had checked himself into a rehab clinic in Malibu,” John says. “I was pleased he was getting treatment.”
John, who has had his own addiction struggles, was regularly by Furnish’s side at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
