James Gavin - George Michael: A Life

Copyright 2022 James Gavin

Cover 2022 Abrams

Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930494

ISBN: 978-1-4197-4794-6
eISBN: 978-1-64700-673-0

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To my friend David Munk

For believing in this project and in me

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 pops 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 Valentines Day.

The Spotify link he shared didnt 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 Englands 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 Youve Changed, featured in his last touring show, Symphonica, in 20122013.

The tweet was a smoke signal from a man in despair, yet almost no one perceived it as thatnot 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 peoples 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 earangelic, 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 voiceinnocent, natural-sounding, with no frills. He just sounded like himself singing, and it was beautiful. Who couldnt 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 ps 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 singers 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 hed created for himself, said Geffen. Earlier, he had witnessed Michaels 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 couldnt bear to look at his own face.