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That is what he thought—not entirely seriously—as he looked up from the bottom line in the late '60s and saw the life-styles that success was buying for his rock contemporaries. Now, of course, he has it all. "Really, I don't think I'll ever be able to spend all my money," he sighs, but he gives it a good shot. Like many pop stars, he is wildly generous with those who have demonstrated their loyalty to him (see box page 40). Not that he stints on himself; he bops constantly from his home in suburban London to his home in Los Angeles, with regular stopovers at the Caribou Ranch in Colorado, where he likes to record, and another sort of ranch in Scottsdale, Ariz. There he concentrates on his tennis, a game chubby little boys can feel ridiculous playing but that the superstar plays with confidence, sometimes with Billie Jean King or Jimmy Connors. In England he lives in the affluent suburb of Virginia Water. His house is a lively jumble. The huge boots he wore as the Pinball Wizard in the movie Tommy stand near a Picasso. Two stuffed leopards are a leap away from three Rembrandt etchings. Says Elton: "All I really crave now is an original Toulouse-Lautrec or a Hieronymus Bosch."
Pretty standard stuff for the man who stands near the head of the richest class of entertainers the world has ever known. But there are some things that are different about Elton John. For one thing, he will not join the exodus of rock stars who are leaving Britain to escape stiff new tax laws. "I can't imagine going to live in Geneva," he says. "There is nothing there but people who've gone to Geneva." He would rather spend time worrying about his new record label, Rocket, which gives its artists much larger than standard royalties. It is a way of paying a debt to his profession, and though it is not a new idea, it is one to which Elton is uncommonly devoted.
Even closer to him is, of all things, the Watford Football Club, which he and his father used to watch in the old days. Elton is now a director of the club, called the Hornets. They are mediocre at best, but Elton lives and dies with their fortunes. He practices with the club, he bawls out its members in the newspaper when they do especially poorly, gives them the royal box at his concerts to encourage them. He has staged benefit concerts for Watford in order to buy the team the new players it needs. A year ago, he gained something like 40 Ibs. and what he claims was an incipient case of alcoholism helping team members drown their sorrows after an endless string of defeats.
Certainly he has loved football since he was a fumble-footed kid. But there is more to it than that. The man whose latest album is a brilliantly successful attempt to write music out of his own past experience is also a man seeking to forge new links with a deeper, possibly more despised past. The Watford Hornets are the symbol of that effort. He firmly believes he might have lost himself in his superstar image had he not rediscovered the club.