In July that year, the Ritz in Tunbridge Wells proudly presented Desire, billed ‘the sensational romance that took London by storm’. It starred Garbo-rivalling goddess Marlene Dietrich as a thief who cons a Parisian jeweller played by Cheltenham-born character actor Ernest Cossart – the professional pseudonym of Emil Holst, younger brother of Gustav. But while inside audiences watched Dietrich serenade leading man Gary Cooper – ‘the stars looking down from above, seem to sing, you’re in love’ – outside the Ritz the pamphleteers of the British Union of Fascists were marching to a very different tune.
There was no avoiding the apostles of Oswald Mosley in the town, a canvassing hotbed spearheaded by the local Tonbridge ‘Action Press Squad’ and its neighbouring Sussex branch, the East Grinstead ‘Motor Propaganda Squad’. In late June the BUF preached isolationism and anti-Semitism to a rapt crowd only two hundred yards away from the Ritz on Newton Road. Many young minds in need of filling with something more tangible than idle dreams of Dietrich and Cooper or the wage-sapping escape of a Florida restaurant Saturday night dinner dance chose to listen.
Among them was a young woman of 22, the live-in nanny at a nearby family-run hotel. She was born Margaret Mary Burns but everybody knew her as Peggy. Whether bored, naïve or merely intrigued by the cut of their trousers, Peggy Burns’ dalliance with the fascists didn’t last longer than a couple of meetings and one march with her cousin from Tunbridge Wells to Tonbridge, passing along the London Road, a stone’s throw from her parents’ house. Word of her political allegiance quickly got back to her father, Jimmy, a veteran of the Great War who’d fought in the Royal Fusiliers. ‘If you ever do that again,’ he chastised Peggy, ‘don’t come back to this house.’
We can only wonder how much, or how little, Peggy drank in from this brief, best-forgotten episode which ended with her father’s scolding. It’s more than likely her friendly neighbourhood bootboys would have wooed her with their party’s official newspaper, an eight-page weekly named after the movement’s synonymous adopted uniform, The Blackshirt. Perhaps the eyes of young Peggy Burns glanced between the calls to ‘sack the Jewish dictators’, the cry to decide ‘for alien or for Briton?’, over the adverts for riding boots and John Bull razorblades and the columns of regular hate-monger Alexander Bowie, compiled that year in a special BUF volume called Bowie’s Annual. If nothing else, she couldn’t have escaped the graphic power of the paper’s logo, only recently redesigned in May that year to incorporate the party’s swastika-style symbol already used on banners, arm-bands and anti-Semitic graffiti streaked throughout London’s East End. A fat, black zigzagging lightning bolt within a circle. The future insignia of Ziggy Stardust, indelibly branded in the psyche of 22-year-old Peggy Burns. Mother of David Bowie.
MOSLEY’S BLACKSHIRTS WEREN’T the last to hurl Starman-shaped thunder-bolts in late-thirties England. Another streaked through the darkness of Saturday morning cinemas, rippling upon the chest of an intrepid American football star turned saviour of the universe. In 1938, the second serial inspired by Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon comic strip hit screens across the country starring former Olympic swimming gold medallist Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe. Where previously Gordon had fought the evil schemes of Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo, Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars brought the action dangerously closer to home. The Martians Gordon encountered took human form, ruled by a vampish queen, an ally of his old foe Ming. Shortly after arriving on Mars, Gordon swaps his clothes for those of the queen’s soldiers: a studded collar over a muscle-clinging long-sleeved top emblazoned with a large electric zigzag. Crabbe’s Flash Gordon not only saved the world from Ming a second time but reclaimed the lightning bolt from the cheerless clutches of fascism for the high fashion of Mars.
In 1938 there was no hard scientific evidence to eliminate the serial’s proposed fantasy of a habitable Mars of art-deco palaces, deafening rocket ships and cave-dwelling clay people. Forty years before Ziggy, no individual had yet to see its surface closer than the hazy distant refractions through a telescope lens, some astronomers distinguishing, or rather imagining, banks of vegetation and a purplish atmosphere called ‘the violet layer’. Nor was anybody necessarily any wiser than Gordon’s dour academic sidekick, Doctor Zarkov. ‘I have repeatedly been asked the question, is there any likelihood of Earth being visited, or should I say invaded, by people from another planet?’ remarks Zarkov. ‘As to its likelihood, I cannot say. But as to its possibility, the answer must be yes.’
On 30 October 1938 that possibility became a reality. At 8 p.m., millions of American radio listeners tuned in to NBC’s regular Sunday night variety programme The Charlie McCarthy Show, McCarthy being the cheeky monocled dummy of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Those who quickly got bored, if not by Bergen and McCarthy then possibly repelled by Nelson Eddy belting out ‘Song Of The Vagabonds’ two minutes in, turned their dials over to the CBS network where they heard Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra playing live from the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown New York. The concert was suddenly interrupted by a breaking newsflash from a strange meteorite crash on a farm in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Reporter Carl Phillips narrated the events to listeners live as they happened. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed,’ gasped Phillips, describing in horror the emergence of ‘a monster’ from the crater which began to shoot a jet of flame destroying everything in its path. Twenty minutes later the station announcer described the scene from the roof of the CBS building, watching a mass exodus from Manhattan as the bells rang warning people to evacuate the city. ‘As the Martians approach.’
It’s estimated around six million heard Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre’s contemporary dramatisation of H. G. Wells’ The War Of The Worlds that night, of which over one million who’d tuned in late took its fake news format as the real thing. The ensuing panic has since become broadcasting history if not, as detailed research suggests, slightly exaggerated myth, nevertheless based on proven instances of listeners jamming the switchboards of local police stations and newspapers in the New Jersey area to report murder, gas attacks and flame-throwing men from Mars. Armed with only words, sound effects and a genius for persuasion, Welles, via Wells, had demonstrated that the human race was ready and willing to accept as fact Zarkov’s ‘probability’ of Martian invasion in the early twentieth century.
Those casual latecomers who tuned in to CBS that night were given no clues they were listening to scripted drama as they heard Raquello’s orchestra strike up ‘a tune that never loses favour’. The song in question was, by October 1938, an established standard already on its way to becoming one of the most recorded in the history of twentieth-century music. It began as an instrumental that fell into the head of a recently jilted young law student and jazz pianist named Hoagy Carmichael one night in 1927 as he sat alone on the ‘spooning wall’ of Bloomington University campus, Indiana. ‘The stars were bright, close to me, and the North Star hung low over the trees,’ he recalled. ‘I looked up at the sky and whistled.’
As Hoagy Carmichael & His Pals, he first recorded his divinely inspired melody, then carrying the Spanish subtitle ‘Estrellitas’, for Indiana’s local Gennett label. Two years later lyrics were added by Mitchell Parish, taking inspiration from Carmichael’s original title and a few suggestive opening lines. The result was a song about a song; an ode to the intangible allure of love and music; a romantic, almost cosmic, reverie in ‘the purple dusk of twilight time’. A song fit for a Starman. Or at least in the case of the 1931 version by Bing Crosby, fit for those destined to duet with a Starman.
And so it was that on 30 October 1938, in Tunbridge Wells, the unmarried Peggy Burns, just turned 25, prepared to mark the following week’s first birthday of her illegitimate son, Terry, while three thousand miles across the Atlantic millions of Americans oblivious to any imminent Martian attack sat beside their radios having just tuned in to Ramon Raquello and his orchestra playing one of their favourite pieces of
music: Hoagy Carmichael’s ever-popular song about a song. ‘A tune that never loses favour.’
A song called ‘Stardust’.
SEVEN
THE GOOD SOLDIER
THE STARS WOULD have seemed especially bright above the blacked-out streets of Hammersmith in the early months of 1940. While the Blitz wouldn’t begin until that autumn, London was already bracing itself for the Nazi’s aerial lightning strike. Hindsight would rose tint a picture of wartime England digging for victory, keeping calm and carrying on. The reality was closer to the Armageddon panic of Welles’ The War Of The Worlds. The first casualty of war was the nation’s sanity. Six months after Neville Chamberlain’s bleak announcement of September 1939 there were more suicides in Hammersmith alone than the local weekly paper could fit on its front pages. Mothers, husbands, nurses and company directors, throwing themselves off balconies, gorging on pills, slitting wrists, choking on belt nooses and mumbling farewell prayers to the god of the gas oven. Others fell victim to the blindness of the blackout: breaking their necks down stairwells, crushed under wardrobes as they toppled trying to hook up their blacking curtains or run down on darkened streets by invisible cars without headlights. Before a single doodlebug had fallen on London, its citizens were doing a grand job of killing themselves without any German assistance.
The cinema projectors rattled on regardless. The films on offer in the British spring of 1940 all but mocked their rationed, death-dodging audience. Over The Moon. Return To Yesterday. The Stars Look Down. Escape To Happiness. In Ninotchka, cinemagoers couldn’t even depend on their supreme goddess Garbo for world-weary empathy. ‘Garbo Laughs!’ blurted the posters. Nobody in England was in any position to join her.
Over Easter weekend, 1940, Hammersmith’s Gaumont Palace celebrated its eighth birthday with the big-screen version of comedian Arthur Askey’s popular radio show, Band Waggon. But it was another film being shown down the far end of King Street in the ABC Commodore which better eased the effort of war for those fragile folk dangling at the end of their tether. The story of a depressed teenager who escapes the grey existence of economic recession for a Technicolor paradise of glittery shoes and dancing aliens. A premonitory tremor of Hollywood glam called The Wizard Of Oz with its yearning lullaby to flee ‘somewhere over the rainbow.’ Thirty-two years before the Starman arrived on Earth, his signature melody was already taking contagious effect.
Life was no rosier for Peggy Burns and her family down in Tunbridge Wells, doomed to fall in the west Kentish approach to London nicknamed ‘doodlebug alley’. Entrusting the care of baby Terry to her parents, Peggy joined the home front women’s workforce as a capstan machinist at the same factory in Hayes, Middlesex which later pressed records for EMI’s Parlophone label. In the interim she fell pregnant to a co-worker, giving birth to a daughter, Myra, in August 1943. The father had agreed to marry Peggy but vanished. The stigma of a second child out of wedlock was too much for the Burns clan to bear. Aged ten months, Myra was given up for adoption and never seen again. In the wartime life lottery, Peggy Burns was nonetheless one of the lucky ones. Only random chance saved her, and the genes of the Starman, from being among the thirty-seven workers killed when a doodlebug hit the Hayes factory during the final frantic months of Nazi bombing.
Back in the blitzkrieged husk of London, the stress of war continued to drive desperate people to commit desperate acts as terrible in their human devastation as anything dropped by the Luftwaffe. One night in April 1944, a woman finished her late shift at the Ministry of War Transport in Berkeley Square where she’d been involved in preparations for the coming D-Day landings. Heading home during the blackout, she was cornered by four men. Their clothes were civilian but their southern American accents betrayed they were most likely GI deserters. They robbed her and kicked her unconscious, leaving her for dead, bleeding on the pavement. She’d also been pregnant and inevitably miscarried. It was the unenviable task of her friend Sonia Brownell – later to become second wife of George Orwell – to write and tell the victim’s husband currently stationed with the Army Educational Corps in Gibraltar. Many years later this bewilderingly violent crime inspired him to write a novel duly dramatised on screen and rebuked by the Crown for the ‘impressionable canker’ stirred among the youth of the early 1970s. The wartime assault upon the wife of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange: a hideous yet vital molecule in the delicate double helix of Ziggy Stardust.
‘WHAT DID YOU do in the war, Ziggy?’
We might well ask.
The heroic chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth fluttered the Reich’s swastika banners in Berlin’s State Opera House for Hitler’s pleasure. The sacred Japanese stages of kabuki strangeness perished in the flames of American carpet bombing. The strains of Holst’s ‘Jupiter’ kept upper lips stiffened on the BBC while, just up the road from Broadcasting House, the ageing H. G. Wells kept fire watch over Regent’s Park. The American Forces Network cheered GIs with the sweet comfort of Artie Shaw and his Orchestra’s cherished bugle-tooting storm through Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’. Judy Garland fell down from Oz to Camp Roberts, California, to sing the Starman-shaped melody of ‘Over The Rainbow’ to servicemen shortly to enter hell in the Pacific. And the mother of David Bowie sweated over a capstan in Middlesex doing her best not to get killed.
Over in North Africa, Peggy Burns’ younger brother, named Jimmy after their father, had fought with the Lothians Yeomanry alongside Field Marshal Montgomery’s Eighth Army before being shipped to Italy where he was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal for his part in the battle of Monte Cassino. Among his fellow ‘Desert Rats’ who’d similarly struggled to acclimatise to the punishing Saharan heat was a slender sharp-shooting Yorkshireman in his early thirties, calling himself ‘John’. He’d been born Haywood Stenton Jones in Doncaster, 1912, second child of a bootmaker called Robert and his wife, Zillah, who died when the boy was four.
When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, John Jones was a 26-year-old clerk working for Dr Barnardo’s children’s charity, living in a flat beside Regent’s Canal in Camden with his wife, a nightclub singer called Hilda, and a baby daughter born out of his affair with a nurse he’d met on business in Birmingham. The 1930s had been a decade of repeated disappointments for Jones as he frittered away his parents’ £3000 inheritance on his pipedream of becoming a showbiz entrepreneur. Blinded by love, he lost two thirds of the money funding a disastrous theatre revue for his new wife. The Joneses gambled what remained on a piano bar in London’s Fitzrovia, then a regular drinking haunt of George Orwell. If Orwell himself ever did darken the door of the Boop-A-Doop club, where Hilda entertained in the exotic guise of ‘Cherie, the Viennese Nightingale’, it evidently wasn’t often enough to keep the business afloat. Forced to make ends meet as a hotel porter, John Jones tempered his humiliating sense of failure with alcohol, eventually developing a stomach ulcer. Finding renewed purpose with the job at Barnardo’s in 1935 rescued him from physical ruin. In much the same way, Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 rescued him from the charade of a by now unsalvageable marriage. When Jones was demobbed after victory in Europe he returned home to be told by his wife she’d found a new lover. They didn’t argue, instead taking the pragmatic step of together investing their war savings and buying a house in Brixton, agreeing to proceed with an amicable divorce with Hilda taking custody of their eight-year-old daughter Annette; his child by another woman.
Meantime, John Jones went back to work as a promotions officer for Dr Barnardo’s. In the spring of 1946, business took him south of the city, to Tunbridge Wells. A single man again, an innate magnetism to entertainment which cost him his pre-war savings must have still stirred within. Jones could have dined alone anywhere in the town. He plumped for the illusory glamour of the Florida restaurant upstairs in the Ritz cinema.
Minds as spectacular as Kepler, Newton and Einstein have attempted to clarify and comprehend the clockwork of the universe. But do any of us truly know what mischievo
us secrets power its obscure mechanism?; what cosmic chimes inspire the precise moment when a star decides to explode or another to form? For fate now tapped the sides of the Starman’s test tube one last time. Humanity had waited long enough. The preparation was complete. The chemical solution was ready. And so John Jones took his table in the Florida and looked up from his menu at the waitress, a young woman whose beauty refused to betray she was already a 32-year-old mother of two.
John Jones meet Peggy Burns. Father of David Bowie meet mother of David Bowie. The hands of space and time, strike Ziggy o’clock.
IN THEIR CRITICALLY intimate courtship weeks of late March and early April, the Ritz projectors flickered their fanfares of consummation. The Seventh Veil, a British romantic drama starring Ann Todd as a concert pianist who ends up a suicidal mental patient until cured by a radical hypnotherapy process using the music of Beethoven. And Duffy’s Tavern, a star-studded if disappointing American radio spin-off featuring Bing Crosby spoofing the song he’d made famous in the previous year’s Oscar-winning Going My Way, ‘Swinging On A Star’. Such were the currents of love, lust, Ludwig van, insanity, suicide and moonbeams drifting in the gulfstream of Burns and Jones nine months before the precious fruit of their union was born.
The end of that year, John moved Peggy and nine-year-old Terry Burns into 40 Stansfield Road, the vacant Brixton terrace house he’d recently bought in partnership with his first wife. It would be another year before their divorce became decree absolute. Meaning, for the third time, Peggy would give birth to a child out of wedlock. But, for the first, the dutiful father was finally standing by her.
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