The 90-year-old, his back hunched and trousers hanging loose, was spotted struggling to carry several bags of shopping from his car up to the small second-floor apartment he calls home.
Moments earlier, his wife Virginia, 84 – Ellen’s stepmother – also paused for breath and looked pained climbing the steep steps after a shopping trip to a nearby CVS pharmacy in La Jolla, California.
Despite his years, Elliott still helped his wife by carrying her bright-green handbag for her.
Ellen DeGeneres’ dad Elliott carries his wife’s handbag. Photo: Coleman/Rayner
A neighbour also hinted Ellen has never visited the modest $350,000 backstreet address where her father has lived for more than 20 years, a world away from the talk-show host’s Beverly Hills home, where the 58-year-old lives with her Aussie wife, Portia De Rossi.
While Elliott himself politely declined to be interviewed by Woman’s Day, a neighbour tells us, “Elliott and his wife desperately need a new place to live. They can’t keep climbing those steps. It’s heartbreaking to see.”
Ellen’s 84-year-old stepmum Virginia takes it one step at a time to their second-floor apartment.
The source pleaded with his daughter to help her dad move somewhere more suitable.
“They should be in an assisted living apartment where they don’t have to climb steps like that,” says our source. “They’ve lived here for a long time, more than 20 years, and I respect him for keeping his independence.
“But hopefully Ellen will realise that helping him move to a place with no stairs will help. I’ve never met Ellen here but I know he goes to see her. I think she just doesn’t know how hard it is for them there.”
Ellen’s mother Betty and Elliott split in 1970 when Ellen was 13.
In contrast to limelight-shunning Elliott, Betty has become a regular on Ellen’s wildly successful TV show, written books and also acted as a gay-rights activist.
In her 1999 book Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey, Betty also told how Elliott, her husband for 20 years, reacted badly when Ellen came out as gay in the mid 1970s, after they had separated.
Ellen remains close to her mum, Betty.
“The person who really seemed to have trouble with Ellen’s news was Elliott,” she wrote.
“Because of their ignorance, he and his wife asked her to move out, saying she would be a bad influence on her young stepsisters.When she called to tell me about it, I could hear the terrible hurt in her voice. ‘El’, I said, trying hard to convince her she wasn’t being rejected by her father, ‘Your dad loves you.'”
‘I know,’ she said but she couldn’t help adding, ‘That’s why he’s kicking me out of the house.'”
Elliot outside his home in La Jolla, near San Diego in California.
But Betty wrote that Elliott came to regret his actions and father and daughter reconciled.
She explained: “For El and her dad, it wasn’t too late. But for some parents who reject their kids and later feel remorseful, it is.”
Elliott, speaking about his daughter two years ago, denied they were still estranged.
He said, “I love her very, very , very much Everything is fine between us. I go up to LA.”
Elliott was pictured with his daughter at Ellen’s 2008 wedding to Portia de Rossi in Beverly Hills.
