George michael, p.1
George Michael, page 1
Copyright © 2022 James Gavin
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ISBN: 978-1-4197-4794-6
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PROLOGUE
In early 2016, after thirty-three years of near-ubiquity in the U.K. press, George Michael, age fifty-three, vanished from public sight. For years, one of British pop’s favored sons had sent out as many as a dozen tweets a day from his various homes in London and from dressing rooms, limousines, and posh vacation spots. But on February 11, he posted his last tweet for months to come. “Hi lovelies!” it read. “Enjoy this playlist on Valentine’s Day.”
The Spotify link he shared didn’t send listeners to “Faith,” “I Want Your Sex,” or any of his other dance hits about romantic and physical obsession, which were favorite subjects of his. Instead, he called the playlist “Heartbreak by George Michael.” The songs ranged from “Last Christmas,” the vengeful tearjerker he had written at twenty as half of England’s premiere boy band, Wham!; to “Jesus to a Child,” an elegy for the love of his life, Anselmo Feleppa, who had died of AIDS years before Michael was out of the closet; to the Billie Holiday lament “You’ve Changed,” featured in his last touring show, Symphonica, in 2012–2013.
The tweet was a smoke signal from a man in despair, yet almost no one perceived it as that—not even in the wake of a series of public scandals and accidents, one of which had left him in a bloody heap on a London express-way. Memories lingered of Michael in his late-eighties heyday: a butch, stubbly, leather-jacketed pinup boy who had become one of the hottest pop stars in the world. It had always been his gift to raise people’s spirits, to make them feel less alone; just the mention of his name made people smile. Even when Michael was at his darkest, Danny Cummings, his longtime percussionist, felt a healing power in his voice. “It had a frequency in it that was very sweet to the ear—angelic,” he said.
To Lynda Hayes, who had delivered an uncredited but famous rap chorus on the Wham! hit “Young Guns (Go for It!),” Michael had “an everyman voice—innocent, natural-sounding, with no frills. He just sounded like himself singing, and it was beautiful. Who couldn’t relate to that?” Performing in stadiums, Michael could transmit those sensations to thousands of people; his shows invariably ended with fans on their feet, dancing. He had done it on the tour for Faith, the 1988 album that had made him a superstar. And he did it again in Symphonica.
After the tour had finished, however, guitarist Ben Butler, who had played all sixty-plus performances, lost contact with Michael. “I sensed that things were not well in his world,” said Butler. “He seemed to have gone completely off the radar.”
The most recent published pictures of him came from Switzerland, where he had checked in for treatment at one of the priciest rehab facilities in the world. Photographers had snapped him on a street holding hands with his handsome Lebanese boyfriend, Fadi Fawaz. In his other hand was a cigarette. His goatee had turned gray; he looked bloated and weary.
Since the beginning, Michael had been adamantly private. “No one will ever know any more about George Michael than they probably do about the next man on the street,” declared Andrew Ridgeley, his partner in Wham!. But for some time, an artist known for his ironclad grip on every facet of his career had been spinning frighteningly out of whack. He could not face the day undrugged, whether by chemicals or anonymous sex. His once-burning ambition to make music had waned. In 2012, his worn-out body had nearly succumbed to pneumonia.
Brits regarded the troubled star with sadness, Americans with pity. Few people, even most of his friends, looked much deeper. “When you thought of George Michael,” wrote Dan Aquilante in the New York Post, “you thought of this carefully crafted image, amply displayed in his groundbreaking videos.” The one for “Faith” showed him in his iconic pose, that of a leather-jacketed, shimmying, butt-shaking, post-West Side Story biker dude with stubble and an earring. For a star who had been terrified of opening the closet door, that revealing gay look implied a clutching at the truth, yet it flew over the heads of his mostly female audience. To them, said Johnny Douglas, one of his recording engineers, Michael was “the most beautiful human being on earth.” At the same time, Douglas added, “he was the white male soul singer that I think every British lad aspired to be.”
Yet Michael himself was a confusion. In interview after interview, he spoke of his longing to be embraced as a serious artist. His Top 10 single, “Freedom! ’90” found him pleading to be seen for who he really was. “Sometimes the clothes do not make the man,” he warned. But fame and its trappings had consumed him since childhood; he defined himself not as a singer-songwriter but as a “pop star,” which to Michael was a synonym for king. “He pops the two p’s when he says it, and his eyes gleam, giving the term a noble air,” wrote the music journalist Rob Tannenbaum.
Yet he sang about freedom with his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Writer Richard Smith saw numerous Michaels on display, none of them quite convincing. “He always appears to be creating some new fantasy self,” said Smith, “and as soon as that betrays him he tries to kill it off, but then creates a new one to take its place.” In the Guardian, Jim White wrote of Michael as a grand contradiction: “a songwriter of real depth compromised by an addiction to the superficial, the glamorous, the unreal.” David Geffen, whose mid-nineties record label, DreamWorks SKG, released the singer’s most candid album, Older, sensed a man in deep discomfort with all he had fought to attain. “He never seemed to be able to live in the career he’d created for himself,” said Geffen. Earlier, he had witnessed Michael’s quixotic battle to cut himself loose from the record label, Sony, that had made his superstardom possible. The outcome had not been happy.
Michael yearned to hide, yet stood on gigantic stages in front of thousands. The front door to his home in the fashionable London neighborhood of Highgate was clearly visible from a low gate a few feet in front of it; anyone could see his comings and goings or wait there for an autograph. He nearly always obliged with a smile, for Michael was a gentleman. “It was impossible not to like him,” said David Bartolomi, one of the countless photographers who took his picture. Yet most of the time, Michael couldn’t bear to look at his own face.
A companion of his since Wham! called the singer a “sad, angry little boy.” Friends such as Chris Cameron, his longtime keyboardist and musical director, were very worried about him. Cameron overheard a tense exchange between Michael and his manager, Andy Stephens, over Michael’s self-destruction. The singer lashed out: “Stop trying to save me from myself!”
CHAPTER ONE
Almost everything to do with George Michael, from his gut ambition to his sometimes crippling insecurities, in some way pointed back to his father. Jack Panos was the model of a self-made 1960s man’s man. Born Kyriacos Panayiotou in 1935, he had grown up with seven siblings in Patriki, a dirt-road village in Cyprus, an island in the Eastern Mediterranean. In later years he would boast of the life he had transcended: that of a shoeless child who survived on bread and olives and used a hole in the ground for a toilet.
Poverty had given him a fierce resolve to better himself. He and a friend, Dimitrios Georgiou, set their minds on the restaurant business, and in 1953 they emigrated to London, a popular destination for Greek Cypriots. They started as busboys, then became waiters. Kyriacos knew that if he were to keep climbing, his given name had to go.
His next step was to find a wife. At a dance, he caught the eye of Lesley Angold Harrison, a British girl from a working-class family. Reared in convent school, Lesley was a lady, fastidiously neat, quiet but firm, and gracefully spoken, with an almost Victorian reserve. She had all the makings of a proper mate, and Jack proposed.
Early in their marriage, they and another immigrant friend of Jack’s shared a flat in Finchley, a suburb of North London. He and Lesley could only afford to live above a laundromat, especially as the kids started coming. In 1959, Lesley gave birth to daughter Yioda; two years later came Melanie. Jack was impatient for a son to carry on his name, though, and on June 25, 1963, in East Finchley, Lesley delivered a hazel-eyed, screaming baby boy.
Despite having anglicized his own name, Jack christened the child Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, which no Brit could pronounce. But he wanted to establish that Georgios was his father’s son and a proud bearer of Jack’s Greek heritage. Once the boy was old enough, Jack would send him off, grumbling, on Saturdays to Greek school.
Where Jack had come from, tradition meant everything. Sons were more important than daughters, and if Yioda and Melanie sensed his attitude, so be it. Georgios certainly did. “I grew up with this terrible feeling of guilt,” he said later. “I was alwa ys the one that was gonna get the easy ride.”
In fact, the pressures of being Jack’s son were stifling. Dimitrios’s boy, Andros Georgiou, who for much of Michael’s life was closer to him than almost anyone—they were often referred to as cousins, although they weren’t—cringed at Jack’s iron fist: “He was a mean bastard, using fear, not respect, to rule and keep control of his household.” During a family vacation in Cyprus, Andros and Georgios stole sweets from a shop, and the owner caught them. Jack punished his son the old-fashioned way. “You could hear the belt swinging down on his arse and legs,” said Andros. “His screams echoed around the building.”
Luckily for Georgios, Jack spent most of his time working. Now an assistant restaurant manager, he could afford to move his family, in 1969, to a semidetached house in Burnt Oak, a suburb of Edgware. He and two Greek headwaiters pooled their money and leased a dilapidated property on the main road; they turned it into the Angus Pride, a steakhouse that also offered Greek specialties.
The restaurant took off, making Jack—who had far more charisma than his partners—a local celebrity. As soon as customers stepped inside, there he was—a broad-shouldered hulk with a shock of thick, graying hair and a hearty hello spoken in a thick Greek accent. Soon he grew tired of sharing his success; Jack dreamed of earning enough money to buy his partners out.
He was a shining immigrant success story, but Simon Napier-Bell, the co-manager of Wham!, sensed “a great coffin of angst somewhere in that family.” Lesley had dutifully helped her husband ascend, but he worked her so hard, said George, that she wound up angry and exhausted. Even though Lesley had a home to run and three children, her “extremely unreasonable husband,” as their son later called him, expected her to hold a day job while the kids were at school. She went to work in a fish-and-chip shop and hated it. The smells permeated her hair, skin, and clothes; she could never fully wash them out. Jack then demanded that she spend evenings working at the restaurant. With almost no spare time, she kept the house in impeccable shape; her son wondered how on earth she did it. She seldom complained, but he sensed her unhappiness. “Depression runs in my family,” he said as an adult.
He had inherited it, but Jack didn’t seem to notice. Interviewed years later about his son, the older man had little to say. “He was a quiet boy,” Jack recalled. Georgios had a mop of mousy brown, curly hair; eyebrows that met in the middle and looked like a long, furry caterpillar; and such impaired vision that he wore Coke-bottle glasses. He hated his appearance, and Jack, intentionally or not, made things worse. “I was never praised, never held,” said Michael. Though once a peacock, Jack tolerated none of that from his children. “Conceit of any kind was considered an absolute sin,” explained Michael. Jack took further steps to keep his son humble. “A few things were said which would probably take your breath away if you heard them from a parent to a child,” Michael explained. “I never got over them. It’s as simple as that.”
Feeling lonely and flawed, Georgios retreated into his own world. He rose at dawn, then walked in his pajamas to an overgrown field behind the house and dug up worms, caterpillars, and ladybugs, which he stored in matchboxes and jars. At the end of the road was a lilac tree that attracted butterflies; he stared at them and tried to catch them. Playing on the radio then was the Stevie Wonder hit “My Cherie Amour”; the boy sang bits of it outdoors in his boy soprano. A neighbor reported to Lesley that her son had a lovely voice.
He thought little of it until the age of eight, when an accident at Roe Green Junior School in nearby Kingsbury made his whole world swerve around. Barreling down a hallway on the way to lunch, he tripped at the top of a flight of stairs and tumbled to the bottom, where he banged his head on the metal pipes of a radiator. The impact knocked him cold, and he awoke in a pool of blood; it had covered his glasses and splashed into his eyes, and he could barely see. Only one student—a girl with a crush on him—came to his aid and called for help. A teacher ran over and removed his glasses, then walked the young man to the nurse. He felt humiliated.
Yet the injury brought an almost magical epiphany; somehow it jogged his brain and opened a new channel. Within six months, his infatuation with creepy-crawlies was gone. Now, he said, “all I wanted to know about was music.”
He and his closest playmate, David Mortimer—their mothers were best friends—crafted a song together and recorded it on the Mortimer family’s tape recorder, with Georgios singing; presciently, they called it “The Music Maker of the World.” That tape machine became their favorite toy. David strummed a guitar; Georgios banged on a biscuit tin in lieu of a drum. He began learning songs off the radio and mimicking the lead vocals. In one of his solos, he imitated Olivia Newton-John singing her top-ten hit “Banks of the Ohio,” a traditional murder ballad in which a woman impetuously plunges a knife into her lover’s chest: “My God, what have I done? I’ve killed the only man I love!”
He couldn’t stand the Greek music his father played, but there wasn’t much else in the house. In the garage, however, he found discarded treasures—mementos of his mother’s carefree dancing days. The boy laid his hands on her abandoned windup gramophone and some battered 45s. They included the Tom Jones blockbuster “Delilah” and two chart-toppers by the Supremes, “Baby Love” and “Stop! In the Name of Love.” One disc was chipped, making part of it unplayable; another of the records kept skipping. Undaunted, he spun them again and again, transfixed by the voices. Jones, a Welsh sex god, sang “blue-eyed soul”—the term coined for R&B sung by white artists. Jones’s hypermasculine, semi-operatic belting, with frills borrowed from Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jackie Wilson, suffused George’s consciousness; it had qualities he would one day emulate. From the Supremes, the reigning girl-group of Motown, Michael got his first taste of the catchy hooks and beats that made a pop song unforgettable.
Around the same time he began tuning into BBC Radio 1, which, as the seventies progressed, played an ever-growing bounty of the decade’s sounds: disco, punk, reggae, psychedelica, Top 40. Georgios wanted desperately to buy records, but Jack forbade it. Longing to get closer to music, he took up the violin. For a few weeks he struggled to play it, then announced he was quitting. His parents insisted he stick with it, and he studied the instrument halfheartedly for years. When his father dragged him out at family gatherings to flounder his way through some formal composition, the boy was mortified.
But it was Jack’s money that paid for a series of gifts that made his dream take wing. Georgios had begged for a cassette recorder, and for his birthday he got one. He began taping songs off the radio, holding the mic close to the speaker. After learning them by heart, he sang them into his recorder, then proudly played the recordings for his pals.
Some of the tunes he singled out from the early-seventies airwaves gave glimpses into the mind of a child who felt like a weirdo. They included “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” a number-one U.K. hit for Middle of the Road, a Scottish bubblegum band. Using kids’ language, the song told an unsettling tale of a boy who winds up deserted: “Last night I heard my mama singing a song / Woke up this morning and my mama was gone.” Michael Jackson’s “Ben” was the title tune of a horror film about a geeky outcast and his pet rat: “With a friend to call my own / I’ll never be alone.” Having adopted all those slithery insects from his backyard, Georgios could relate. His favorite song was “Little Willy.” Recorded by the Sweet, a quartet of androgynous hippie rockers, it portrayed a London lad who defies his disapproving parents to become the strutting, dancing “king around town”: “Willy wears the crown . . . you can’t push Willy ‘round.”
When he saw the Sweet perform the song on his favorite TV show, he was mesmerized. Like fifteen million other Brits, Georgios tuned in every Thursday night to the country’s favorite musical variety show. At 7:35, the boy watched an explosion of multicolored flames followed by a flock of dancing teenyboppers. Then came the announcement that made his pulse race: “Yes, it’s number one, it’s Top of the Pops!” For the next thirty minutes, Georgios’s eyes and ears were glued to a parade of mostly British acts, from the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones to the latest one-hit wonders. Top of the Pops filled his head with daydreams about how it must feel to stand on that pedestal, adored and applauded by all. Georgios studied the performers, pondering what had gotten them there. He stared at the long-haired youths strumming electric guitars, at the skintight spandex and bare midriffs, the beards and platinum hair, and analyzed every phrase, looking for clues.
