For the cardinal sin of not once but twice forsaking the amiable overtures of Elton and David, you deserve never to be graced by their majestic presence again. But fate is inexplicably kind. Two years later, while your twins are in utero, you and David B. decide to take one last couple’s vacation to the Greek island of Mykonos. It’s a fantastic place with spectacular sights, including a nude beach ambitiously but more or less accurately called Super Paradise. You very much want to go au naturel but feel insecure about being nude on a beach among hundreds of smart-phone-bearing tourists. (Posed, well-framed paparazzi photographs of your face and clothed body are one thing; candid, weird-angled pictures of Neildini and his two spherical assistants are another entirely.)
So you put on short shorts and find a couple of discreetly placed chairs and begin drinking to still your beating, dick-pic-fearing heart when David says, “Hey, look over there! Is that David Furnish?”
Yep. That’s David Furnish.
“Yep, that’s David Furnish.”
“Go talk to him!”
“I’m not going to go talk to David Furnish at the gay nude beach in Mykonos! I don’t even know him!”
“He gave you his card! He wanted to hang out!”
“We’re on a gay nude beach in Greece. Everybody already is ‘hanging out.’ ”
David does not find this funny.
“Neil, go talk to David Furnish now!”
So you begrudgingly get up and go over and say hello, and David and his friends couldn’t be nicer, and invite you and David to join their little group. Elton isn’t with them, but that night you and David B. are sitting at Mykonos’s famous Applebee’s Nobu Matsuhisa restaurant with David Furnish and a dozen gorgeous guys whom it is entirely possible he and Elton packed in their luggage. (That is a joke. Sir Elton never travels with luggage.)
As the meal and the drinks come and go, the two Davids hit it off particularly well. Must be a “David” thing, you suppose. David B. is as excited as you are about your imminent fatherhood, and as their conversation turns slightly personal and the booze starts kicking in he decides to violate your pact of strict confidentiality. He leans over and says, “Neil and I have a secret to tell you. We’re expecting twins through surrogacy, in the middle of October.”
At which point David F. blanches, looks around furtively to make sure no one else is listening, and says, “That’s unbelievable, because I have a secret for you: Elton and I are expecting a child in late December through surrogacy!”
Your jaws nearly fall into your txakolina. What are the odds? What are the chances of two male-male celebrity couples randomly bumping into one another in Mykonos—granted, Mykonos is the most likely place for two celebrity gay couples to randomly bump into each other, but it’s still pretty unlikely—and discovering they’re both simultaneously going through the exact same process of hope, disappointment, breakthrough, setback, paranoia, and anticipation known as surrogacy?
From that moment on, you were fast friends, you reflect while toweling off from your dip in the pool and pondering whether to take a quick drive to Monte Carlo in one of the convertibles Elton and David keep on hand for their guests’ disposal. The shared uniqueness of your circumstances serves as a bond. Within a week Elton is flying the two of you on his private plane to San Diego and back to attend one of his concerts. And a few weeks later, he invites you to spend a week at his house in Nice for the first time. And here you are. And holy shit.
You reach the place by climbing a curving road up Mont Boron surrounded by pine trees until you reach a big set of metal gates. They open, and you behold emerald green lawns, a flower garden radiating every color of the rainbow, and a magnificent pool fronting a villa one can only assume Elton time-shares with God. It’s got a gym and a massage therapist and spectacular gardens and a tennis court and a delightful staff and when you wake up in the morning all your laundry is washed and folded and put away more neatly than you could ever possibly do yourself. And tasteful? You want tasteful? The entire place was designed by Gianni Versace. Everything, from the layout of the house down to the design of the toilet-paper-holder thingies. It’s a world beyond the beyond, one of the most extraordinary and exclusive destinations to which any human could ever dream of getting invited.
You quickly learn that the only time you are expected to be anywhere is dinner. Guests assemble in semiformal attire, at seven o’clock. Elton shows up in whatever specific diamond- and jewel-encrusted clothing he’s chosen for the night. Could be diamond-studded shoes. Could be a watch with sixteen rubies floating in it. Also, his suit might be purple, or yellow, or orange. It would not shock you at all to learn he has infrared clothing.
Caviar is served, because why does caviar exist if not to be served at the cocktail hour of a party in Nice, and then you go in for dinner. On any given night your fellow guests might be Tim Rice or Elvis Costello or Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale or any of dozens of endlessly fascinating people. This evening the dinner guests happen to include Bono and his wife, Alison (Mrs. Bono?), and The Edge and his wife, Morleigh (Mrs. The?). Bono is an incredibly charismatic, interesting, and interested person, and yes, he does keep the sunglasses on indoors. You hit it off splendidly; he’s very much a classic Irish storyteller in the style of James Joyce, or Denis Leary. Later, you will all go to a private VIP room at the Monte Carlo Casino and hang out with Prince Albert and his fiancée and Liza Minnelli, who will sing for you.
That last bit may have been slightly exaggerated but still, not bad for a Tuesday.
When living in Elton’s world, your natural tendency to observe yourself living your life kicks into hyperdrive. Take last night. Elton decided he wanted to get dinner at La Petite Maison, one of the best restaurants in all of France, and therefore the world. So his drivers and security people prepared two 1955 convertible Bentleys to chauffeur you and David B. in one car, Elton and David F. in another. And you cruised downhill through the streets of Nice as the perfect sun set over the perfect sea and people stared and waved, and all you could think was, I’m in a James Bond movie. I’m in a James Bond movie. Any moment an agent from Spectre is going to start shooting at me from a passing Rolls-Royce. But that’s okay because then my car will release oil from its trunk and make the Spectre car crash.
It’s funny to watch yourself grow quickly and eerily adjusted to your surroundings. On the first morning you timidly ask Laurent and George, the two wonderful assistants whose job it is to provide guests with whatever they need, “George? Laurent? Would it be possible to have a cappu—?” A hot frothy cup sits steaming in front of you before you can even say “-ccino”. Then Laurent says he’s ready to prepare you whatever breakfast your heart desires, and the very idea that your heart could desire a breakfast nearly moves you to tears. Yet within forty-eight hours this insane, impossible idea that you can have whatever you want to eat at any time becomes so second nature to you that you find yourself barking orders like: “George! Laurent! Ripe blueberries, please!” and “George! Laurent! My 85 percent pure dark Guatemalan hot chocolate has lost its heat! Qu’est-ce que se passe?”
And at the center of this world sits this incredible force of nature named Elton John. You have seen him walk through a Dolce & Gabbana store that’s been opened just for him, saying, “We’ll take this one and this one and those five over there and Neil, pick out whatever you like.” (This puts you in an awkward if enviable position: Do you pick out the $7,000 super-kick-ass dinner jacket? Or do you not because you don’t want to be that guy buying the most expensive thing, even though he said to pick whatever you want and it doesn’t really mean anything to him financially? Best play it safe and get the medium-priced thing, which in this case is a mere $800. Man, are some ethical dilemmas more fun than others or what?)
What is easy to overlook is that the man is so fundamentally nice. He did not grow up rich; he spent most of his childhood living in a lower-middle-class semidetached house. And despite the superficial pomp and circumstances he retains a deep-seate
d humility. He’s genuinely liked by almost everyone he encounters. He’s very well informed, spending much of his morning reading every newspaper under the sun. (This works out great, since so much of your time with him is spent under the sun.) Plus he’s hilarious. He has a habit of walking around singing songs, his own and others, and replacing the lyrics with filthy words. “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” for example. There are several variations of this lyric that he likes to sing, soulfully. It is never not funny. And David Furnish is every bit as full and extraordinary a human being. He’s an accomplished film producer who has devoted his life to his family and to leading the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has raised over $200 million to support HIV/AIDS programs in more than fifty countries. He showers you and your David with respect and guidance every time you visit.
Despite their lifestyle, there is nothing remotely snobbish about them. One year they show up at your nice-but-not-Nice-nice house in LA for the Super Bowl. Several security personnel hover outside on the street, but inside your two guests make themselves perfectly at home, friendly, gracious. Elton lolls around in a tracksuit watching the game, talking about the players, yukking it up with your buddies. When he and David leave, your friends have to stop and take a moment and pinch themselves. One of them jokes, “That was an amazing Elton John impersonator you hired.”
It’s this very normalcy and personal ease that makes it so strangely not strange to spend family time with them, to watch the four kids play with one another in the garden (they have a second child in 2013), or to see them reading bedtime stories to their kids just as you do to yours. Elton keeps photo albums full of Polaroids of every guest who’s ever stayed with him. One day you look through a bunch of previous albums. In years past they were full of half-naked people doing or about to do very naughty things, but the recent albums are far more G-rated because they are literally full of kids, theirs and yours and many others. Elton has become a bona fide family man.
A family man who, when you mention you need a backpack for a quick trip, gives you a $3,000 Yves St. Laurent bag to keep.
Which is why, even though it feels like destiny that your David spotted Elton’s David on Mykonos at precisely the same imminently momentous occasion in all four of your lives, and you hope and believe those lives will remain intertwined forever; and even though there could be no more pleasant experience in the entire world than spending a week at Elton John’s “summer house” on the French Riviera; despite all that, it is probably good for your soul when those weeklong trips are over, and the none-too-friendly clerk at the airport, who cares not even un peu in whose house you have been vacationing, orders you to slap down $150 for each piece of oversize luggage.
It’s a bracing but necessary swift slap in the face.
Time to go back to reality.
* * *
To tweet about how awesome Sir Elton John is, go HERE.
To live a life in which you never meet Sir Elton John, go HERE.
To spend more time with Sir Elton John, go back to the top of this chapter and reread it. Continue as needed. Don’t be ashamed. Why would you want to leave?
* * *
1“Squee.” 1 (verb): To emit an onomatopoetic girlish swooning sound out of pure fanboy adulation. 2 (noun): the sound itself.
Neil Patrick Harris
@ActuallyNPH
Tweets
You first hear about Twitter from Felicia Day, your Dr. Horrible costar. “You’ve got to try Twitter,” she said. “Sounds stupid,” you say.
about 3 hours ago
You’re not sure about social media. AOL chat rooms helped you come out. But Facebook? “Neil! It’s Jeremy from PE class! Let’s do lunch!” #worst
about 3 hours ago
But Twitter quickly goes from want to need so you cave in, thinking it will just be a thing to send your friends funny pictures.
about 3 hours ago
But within a week, with no promotion, you have 30,000 followers. Soon, everywhere you go, you tweet about it. #YouWinFelicia
about 3 hours ago
You learn your lesson on Twitter early on when an aging soap star is slated to play Robin’s father on HIMYM.
about 3 hours ago
The night before taping he backs out ’cause “he didn’t have enough lines” and “the part wasn’t big enough.” He screws the cast over, and you’re furious:
about 3 hours ago
is a d-bag. The actor, (Robin’s dad) agreed to a cameo, then last night bailed, saying the part wasn’t ‘substantial’ enough.
about 3 hours ago
Turns out the soap’s on CBS, and within 7 minutes your publicist calls and says take it down. “No,” you say. “Yes!” he says. And he’s right.
about 3 hours ago
Sure enough, it turns into a moderately big story you bear the brunt of. Lesson: don’t ever call anyone a d-bag on Twitter. Even d-bags.
about 3 hours ago
You even launch an offshoot account, @NPHFoodPorn, strictly to show pics of great meals. (Some non-foodie fans find them odious.)
about 3 hours ago
Now you love Twitter. You like the brevity. 140 characters, that’s it. It keeps you from ranting.
about 3 hours ago
You like giving shout-outs to friends and crafting bite-sized tweets and purposely only following exactly 69 people. #heh #heh
about 3 hours ago
* * *
Go HERE.
Unless you prefer to go HERE.
It’s the night before Super Bowl XLVI (spoiler alert: Giants 21, Patriots 17), and you are in the host city of Indianapolis, attending something officially known as The DirecTV Super Saturday Night Hosted by Mark Cuban’s HDNet and Peyton Manning, although in reality it’s a Katy Perry concert.
Earlier this afternoon you’d participated in The DirecTV Sixth Annual Celebrity Beach Bowl, playing flag football with Joe Manganiello and Kate Upton and Artie Lange and other equally random people on a gigantic artificial beach built underneath a gigantic heated tent that was erected in the outfield of the local triple-AAA ballpark and then filled with 700 tons of sand, a few artificial palm trees, a full concert stage, and many other wonders dreamed up by the good people in the publicity department of DirecTV.
Now it’s early evening, and Katy Perry has taken the stage with a gaggle of gay dancers (and yes, “gaggle” is the proper term for a group of gay dancers). You’ve worked with Katy before1 and had a great time, and now you and David are in the VIP section trying to enjoy her concert. But it’s a little crowded and hard to see, so you leave that area and join the rest of the concertgoers nearby so you can really soak up Katy in all her big-bosomed blue-haired glory when boom!
Someone kicks you in the ass. Like, hard.
You stumble forward a few steps, then turn around to see the culprit. It’s a twentysomething girl with a beer in her hand. She has a sullen, vapid expression on her face, and she’s standing next to her equally sullen and vapid twentysomething friend.
You shout, “Did you just kick me?”
She ignores you, even though you’re five feet away and closing in rapidly.
“Excuse me,” you repeat, “but did you just, like physically kick me in the ass?”
In the half second you wait for her response you silently reflect on the irony that while people threaten to “kick someone’s ass” all the time, rarely is the act literally done.
“Yeah, whatever,” she goes. (She is the kind of person who “goes” things rather than “says” them.)
“No, not whatever,” you say. “You don’t just kick somebody. Don’t ever kick me! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
And she goes, “I don’t care, you’re a faggot so it doesn’t matter what you say.”
Wow. Just, wow.
David’s fists start clenching. He gets up in the girl’s face. “What’d you call him? What’d you call him?” You hold him back. It’s such an intense experience, not only because in and of itself it’s crazy,
but because it makes you understand how lucky you are as a gay man to be living in Hollywood. You’re exposed to all kinds of tabloid gossip and internet slander living in LA, but in general you no longer have to worry about total strangers kicking you in the ass and calling you a faggot. This is extreme homophobia, and it justifies an equally extreme response. Someone’s calling you a faggot? Well, you know exactly what you have to do:
Calmly notify the proper authorities.
You walk to the nearest security guys and say, “Hey, that girl over there just physically accosted me and called me a faggot. Can you get her kicked out of here?” They are happy to oblige. So you point her out and stand behind her as the men approach. She ignores them, then tries to disappear into the crowd, then screams “Get your hands off me!” as they physically escort her out. Oh, and best of all, best of all, you find out later they ended up putting her in jail for the night for resisting arrest outside the venue.