Time Capsule

February 14, 1984: On tour in Australia, Elton John gets married - to a woman.

February 14, 1984: On tour in Australia, Elton John gets married - to a woman.

It was a traditional Anglican church wedding. The Reverend James Whild presided as hymns filled the vaulted space of St Mark’s church in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The bride wore a silk and lace wedding gown and a heart-shaped gold pendant embedded with 63 diamonds. The groom looked dapper in a white frock-coat, striped silk shirt, mauve bow-tie, black pants and a boater with a mauve sash. It was Valentine’s Day, and Elton John was making one last attempt at being heterosexual.

Even at the time, the wedding of the 36-year-old pop star and his German-born sound engineer, Renate Blauel, was greeted with disbelief among those who had always assumed John was gay. Singer Rod Stewart summed up the reaction with his message to the happy couple, which paraphrased Elton’s most recent hit: “You may be still standing, but we’re all on the f--king floor.”

The marriage was over four years later, without producing the children John said he wanted. Ever since then, Blauel has steadfastly refused all offers to spill the inside story on their brief union, but 1984’s biggest celebrity wedding stands as one of the most extreme and public examples of a man wrestling with his own psychosexual demons.

The couple had met in a London recording studio in early 1983 while making his comeback album Too Low For Zero. She was, by all reports, a quiet and studious 28-year-old who favoured jeans and T-shirts and had ambitions to become a record producer. By the time John arrived in Australia less than a year later, she was part of his entourage and a confidante. He proposed to her over dinner in an Indian restaurant in Sydney on February 10 and announced the engagement to a media firestorm the following day.

The British tabloids went ga-ga, and so did Gary Clarke, a young Melburnian who was one of John’s regular male companions at the time. In his tell-all memoir Elton, My Elton, Clarke claimed that only two nights before the wedding proposal, he and Elton had enjoyed a three-way tryst with another man in the singer’s suite at the Sebel Townhouse hotel. After the engagement was announced, Clarke says he was sent out with Blauel to help her shop for a wedding dress.

Was it a sham marriage? John has openly acknowledged his homosexuality for the past 10 years, and says he knew he was gay even as he was getting married. But he has always insisted that he and Blauel genuinely loved each other, however misguided the marriage might have been.

Bernie Taupin, the lyricist who has been John’s veteran collaborator, put the marriage down to Elton’s overpowering desire to have a family. Gary Clarke, who was embittered after being dumped by the superstar, suggested less kindly that John craved acceptance among the establishment and staged the marriage as an act of defiance against his mother, Sheila, who had never met Blauel and was on the other side of the world, in Britain.

There may be a simpler explanation, of course – by his own admission, at the time of his wedding John was well into a cocaine and booze addiction that would eventually see him quaffing six martinis in a sitting and snorting cocaine every four minutes.

In a recent interview, John explained: “A drug addict thinks like this: ‘I’ve had enough boyfriends, and that’s not made me happy, so I’ll have a wife – that will change everything.’ And I loved Renate. She’s a great girl. I really, really loved her. But, you know … it is one of the things I regret most in my life, hurting her.”

Richard Guilliatt