Featured in 'Rocketman,' Reid was John’s lover and handled the pop star's affairs for 28 years before an epic falling out.
“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. Photo: M. Fresco/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. He was a tower of strength,” Reid told the Daily Record. Picture: Getty Reid met Elton John, then known as Reg Dwight, at a Motown Christmas party. “I never thought he would betray me but he has betrayed me.”.
Their professional partnership would last 28 years with Reid being present for John’s career hitting stratospheric heights, often as his personal life hit deep lows due to the performer’s alcohol and drug use, marriage and divorce to Renate Blauel, the forging and continuation of his partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin, lawsuits, and loves lost and found. Reid was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, the son of John Reid, a welder, and Betty, a shop worker.
“I trusted him,” John said of Reid in court.
As Elton John’s lover in the early 1970s, John Reid was witness to the arrival of one of the world’s greatest entertainers. Like John, Reid would struggle with drugs and alcohol and in 1991 checked into the same recovery clinic John had stayed at when he got sober in 1990.
Two years later they would be facing each other in court, this time on opposing sides with John suing accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Andrew Haydon, director of John Reid Enterprises, claiming negligence and breach of duty. 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.
[2] The ending of their business relationship in 1998[3] led to a legal action in 2000. Both men spent big on sports cars, yachts, jewelry, and property, with Reid reportedly owning multiple homes at one point. Elton John (left) with his manager John Reid, on their way to a luncheon in honor of Buddy Holly at the Orangery in Holland Park, London in September 1976. They moved in with each other, and began a romantic relationship as well as a business one, as John became Reid's first client.
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’ve never claimed to have discovered him. (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.).
The Italian fashion designer was coming home from a neighborhood walk when a madman appeared out of nowhere and shot him dead on the steps of his beloved Miami Beach mansion. [6], In 1974, in New Zealand, in a widely reported incident, Reid threw champagne in the face of a party host and is alleged to have punched the Auckland model and journalist Judith Baragwanath[7] who came to the man's defence, sending her to the floor. READ MORE: Elton John's Past Struggles With Drugs and Alcohol, Professionally, their relationship ended in 1998, the same year John’s auditors discovered a reported £20 million gap in his accounts.