Lady Gaga is godmother to Elton John's son
LOS ANGELES (AFP) – British music superstar Elton John has revealed that he and his partner have chosen pop diva Lady Gaga to be their baby boy's godmother, as he spoke of his joy at being a father.
"Yes, yes she is," John told ABC's Babara Walters when she asked him if the outlandish singer was the godmother of his son, Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, in an interview broadcast late Friday.
"When you get to the real person underneath, there's a very simple New York girl who loves her parents. I love her to death and a lot of people said, 'oh, you know, that's crazy,' but they don't know her and we do."
Zachary was born December 25 to a surrogate for John, 64, and his partner 48-year-old Canadian filmmaker David Furnish, and the couple told ABC of their delight in having a son, and their determination not to spoil him.
"I knew I'd feel joy but it was the most relaxing thing that's ever happened to me," John said.
"We change him, we bath him, we feed him and we read him a story every night," said John of the couple's routine. "And we take him to lunch."
But the millionaire singer said he was determined his four-month-old would learn about values, even though he was being brought up in the lap of luxury.
"The worst thing you can do to a child, and I've seen it happen so many times, is the silver spoon," John said. "Being the child of a famous person is very difficult and we're very well aware of the pitfalls of that."
Furnish, who married John in 2005 after 12 years together, agreed. "Our life might be very luxurious, but it's all come from hard work," he said.
"Both Elton and I have sort of earned everything we've done in our careers and furthered our educations through our own drive and our own ambitions and we want Zachary to be exactly the same sort of way."
By turning to a surrogate mother, the couple followed in the footsteps of "Sex in the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker and her actor husband Matthew Broderick who had twin girls by a surrogate mother in 2009.
Latino pop star Ricky Martin also used a surrogate to have twin boys before announcing he was gay.
Elton John has sold more than 250 million records in a career spanning four decades and the singer-songwriter was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
It was confirmed on Saturday that John and Furnish will attend the wedding next Friday of Prince William and Kate Middleton in Westminster Abbey.
John sang the hit "Candle in the Wind" at the funeral of William's mother Princess Diana in the abbey after her death in a car crash in Paris.