by Marc Spitz
I have a Polaroid photo of myself and Angie Bowie sitting in a banquette at a friend’s Lower East Side bar. I don’t remember posing for it but for some reason I’ve saved it. It’s about seven years old at the time of this writing, so I would be about thirty-one and Angie would be in her early fifties. She is slim and tan, with high cheekbones, plucked eyebrows and a shock of bleached white hair. She wears a spaghetti-strap black dress and in the photo, one of the straps is falling off. I am wearing sunglasses indoors. I have a cigarette dangling out of my mouth. My hair is short. I wear a short-sleeve black shirt and an iridescent green tie. My head is tilted to the left and touches hers as we pose, as thought we’ve known each other for fifteen years. It was the first time we’d ever met in person. That should tell you something about Angie Bowie’s energy. I’ve asked other people who’ve known her whether or not they felt the same thing upon meeting her in person: a sense of hyperfamiliarity and comfort, as if she’s never stopped being a hostess, coordinator and leader of some kind of ever-flowing outsider scene. I’ve known people like her. The politically incorrect term for some of them is “fag hag,” I suppose, and doing theater in New York, I’ve certainly had my share of association with this type. But there’s something different about Angie, and it’s entirely possible that her place in the larger Bowie myth is that difference. In a way, she is a great artist in her own right, only her art is socialization. I had never thrown a party for anyone in my life and, as I said, was already over thirty when I threw a party for Angie Bowie. I feted her. Invited friends in the music and publishing industry, took care of the music, the cocktails, took care to make sure she was comfortable, as this type of thing seemed somehow more important than I’d ever thought it could or should be. This photo is a document, in its way, of Angie Bowie’s often unsung but no less great talent.
I also wish to mention that Randy Jones, the cowboy from the Village People, attended this party. I just want that on the record, since I have no Polaroid of him.
9.
MARY ANGELA BARNETT was born on the northern coast of the island of Cyprus in 1949 to her mother, Helena, and her U.S. Army colonel father, George Barnett. Her father had relocated to Cyprus after the war.
“My father escaped the Depression by leaving America and becoming a mill operator in Saudi Arabia,” she tells me. “Then to the Philippines. Unfortunately the second year that he was there, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was in the ROTC. He had no choice but to go up into the mountains and fight in a guerilla war against them. All these people who worked for my father went with them. For three years in the American army no one knew who was alive and who was dead but they kept hearing that the guerilla resistance was harassing the Japanese and generally causing havoc. They couldn’t send supplies. They sent nothing. But for three years they lived in the mountains of north Lausanne. When he came back they asked him to go to DC and become a general. He went on a recruiting tour of America. He saw what was happening in the South and he told them there is no place in these times for an army. ‘The way this country is now, I have fought with brown men for three years and you want to treat these people so badly?’ He wouldn’t accept the generalship. He accepted a mining job in Cyprus instead. He went there as a lowly foreman with no degree in mining yet. For three years they argued with him about the GI Bill. Finally the army gave him his allowance to go to college. He went back to America for three years and got his degree. My older brother went to college the same time as him. That was the kind of man he was. He was a bona fide person who did what he said. He did not believe he was a hero. That really affected who I am. I’m very focused. I think it’s because of him. My mother encouraged me to learn from him. At that time, women had nothing. They had no choices. No rights. So from when I was born in 1949 to the invention of the Pill in 1962, I had fourteen years of women being broodmares—this is how they were perceived—and women being second-class citizens.”
At age nine, Angie was shipped off to St. George’s, a small, private Swiss boarding school in the city of Clarens. Although comfortable, Angie was one of the only Americans and her family was relatively one of the poorest; her education was funded by her father’s mining firm. It was there that she first discovered her rebellious spirit. “Like most boarding schools there were many rules and regulations,” she writes in Free Spirit, the first of her two memoirs. “No gum, no swearing, no playing jacks on hall tables and only two to a piano box during practice.”
She studied all the major subjects as well as art and theater, showing expert aptitude in all areas as a matter of course. “I was a great student. I was a prefect. I couldn’t get into trouble. That wasn’t a possibility. My father and mother couldn’t afford to send me to that school; our company sent me to that school. I was an extension of my father’s dignity. I had to do every single thing correctly, have great grades, be a prefect, be house captain, do everything that had to be done, learn French, learn Spanish, learn Italian. That was my job. The only thing that was of any importance in our house was having a function.”
This isn’t to say that Angie avoided trouble. Her natural inquisitiveness and rebellious spirit often put her at odds with the more provincial aspects of her faith. “Catholic school was a nightmare,” she says. “I couldn’t stand the smell. It smelled of peanut butter and plastic.”
When she was seven she was caught being kissed by a neighbor, incurring the rage of her otherwise good-natured father. “I got beaten within a fuckin’ inch of my life by my father,” she says. “He came back from work and found me with this boy Billy McDonald. Billy said to me, ‘Oh, come into the woodshed,’ and I guess he tried to kiss me. Billy was sent off. My father was just the most wonderfully well-read and pleasant man I had ever come across, but his face had become like a monster and he chased me into the house. The company, Cyprus Mining Corp., used to provide all the furniture. The bed that was in my room had one of those old-fashioned iron bed frames. He got a camel whip and he tried to swat me. He was red in the face and furious.
“To me it was the most natural thing. The little boy tried to kiss me and I’m nearly murdered? The only thing I wanted to know was why nobody would talk about sex. It was interesting to me. I really had a problem with it. You have to understand we’re talking about the 1950s. Nobody would say jack. No one would explain jack.”
A lifelong intellectual curiosity that directly led to her and David Bowie becoming bisexual rock ’n’ roll liberators a decade and a half later began with the swing of that camel whip. “It has to do with investigating what the problem was with everybody about sex,” she says. “Couldn’t understand it. Didn’t get it. Obviously the motivating feature of the planet. All the major religions were about making cannon fodder so you could recruit more people to your religion, but basically if you’re not fucking everything that moves and inseminating people that you conquer then what’s the point? The whole thing was about sex. They needed more pussy.” Angie has written a slim book on bisexuality called Bisexuality (“I do believe in intellectual sexuality,” she writes. “That’s what makes me bounce out of bed every morning and attack life”) and is currently working on a more epic history.
Before studying economics and marketing overseas at Kingston Polytechnic College in London, Angie studied in America at Connecticut College, then a women’s school. There she began an affair with a troubled student named Lorraine. It was a union that the faculty and authorities considered scandalous. “What else was I supposed to do?” she tells me of the affair. “I promised my father I wouldn’t get pregnant.” While at school she began to realize that society was not set up for her to enjoy the kind of options she felt best suited to. “Being someone’s wife was never an option for me.”
Angie’s heroes were, tellingly, all male. “I was big on Gandhi. He was assassinated about the time that I was at school in Switzerland. I read Nine Hours to Rama. All about the gentle nature of peace through nonviolence and the whole idea that men and women share all domestic tasks equally. That
resonated with me. I was just crazy about Gandhi. Then when I was at college, as everyone does at college, I read Khalil Gibran books, and that finished any idea of organized religion for me. And with that it finished any kind of idea of being a wife and mother. Do you know Khalil Gibran? He was a very brilliant Lebanese man. Being in school and being alone and isolated, Khalil Gibran was like a toss-back to my home. He was a friend, you know what I mean? Between the covers of a book. And the most important line of his that I remember all the time is that ‘children are the arrows that you shoot from the bow.’ To me that was totally accepted. I never looked back, never wanted to go back and be a child. Never wanted to live amongst my family. [After school] I was happy to be the arrow. Fly through the air.”
A self-described “Europhile,” Angie was already familiar with London culture. She had family friends who lived there and spent holidays in the city. “It was exciting. The magazines. Pirate radio was happening. And the bands. British youth didn’t want to accept this whole American rock ’n’ roll thing; particularly the Rolling Stones were reminding everyone that rock ’n’ roll was based on the tunes of African American artists. The mods-and-rockers thing was fun too. The mods versus rockers riots were the first time anyone young was on TV. They were talking about them like they were criminals; didn’t matter, they were on the news. It was giving them power. By the late sixties, we all felt on top of the world. We felt like the idiots who caused wars had gotten out of it by the skin of their teeth, and now the next generation was gonna prove that peace was a better thing.”
In her senior year, in 1966, at age sixteen, she tried to start a career that might enable to her remain in London. “I tried to do some modeling my last year of college in England. Took the shots. ‘Sorry, you look far too intelligent to be a model.’”
“Did you think you were beautiful?” I asked her, wondering how someone would just decide to launch a career as a professional model.
“No. I thought that I looked intelligent. That was not beautiful. You gotta look dumb and suck a lot! That was considered exciting by anyone in the entertainment business at that time. I don’t have that attitude and certainly wasn’t prepared to give them an inch.”
The fact that Angie offered herself up to the modeling industry gives you some idea of her force of will and sense of confidence. She wore her dirty-blond hair short, was given to wearing tailored men’s suits and used her extreme charisma to make an impression on both men and women of all persuasions, including Calvin Mark Lee and Lou Reizner (whom she also began dating around this time).
“I always dressed as a man, which was probably another reason that Calvin and I got along very well,” she writes in Backstage Passes. “I decided that we were quite sympathetic and we got along quite well—a similar sense of humor and lewd attitude towards women.”
Lee encouraged her to pursue a serious position at the label. “Calvin was from San Francisco,” she says. “He understood that you couldn’t sweep women under the carpet. Lou Reizner was old school. But [label head] Irving Green loved me; every time they would come to London to see how their operation was going they would insist to Lou, ‘You have to make sure Mary Angela is there. You should give her a job. She needs to work for Mercury.’ I was still thinking, ‘What am I going to do and how am I gonna stay in England?’ I had to get an American company to hire me. Green cards were so hard to get. I would be taking a job from an English kid. So by the second year of college I was already figuring out how I could stay. I thought if I could become indispensable to Calvin and Lou as a marketing agent, I would be able to stay in London. So that’s what I got busy doing. David was my first marketing case.” She was essentially his A & R person as well, helping Lee convince Lou Reizner to allow Bowie to be signed to the label in the first place.
“[Reizner] hated me,” David told Cameron Crowe. “She thought I was great. Ultimately she threatened to leave him if he didn’t sign me. So he signed me.”
By the time they got together romantically, David Bowie was a Mercury artist. The story of their union has been told many times in many Bowie biographies, as well as Angie’s own memoirs. At Calvin Mark Lee’s invitation, she attended a record release fete for another Mercury signing, King Crimson. She was wearing a purple velvet three-piece suit with a matching silk tie and stood out among the hippies, professional and otherwise. David, in T-shirt and simple trousers, could not resist asking her to dance (famously inquiring “Do you jive?”—a pick-up line that does not work unless you are David Bowie). Angie did indeed jive, and soon … they were jiving and then some.
“I came back from being away for a few days; the flat was spic and span,” Finnegan recalls. “David never ever cleaned up after himself. He was a total slob. Always a sink full of dirty dishes, overflowing ashtrays, clothes everywhere.” Given his fastidious mother (“She was a very strange sort of uncommunicative woman. Very straitlaced, very stiff,” according to Finnegan), David must have relished having his own space to leave in funky disarray. Angie was not, however, going to abide it.
“Suddenly it was all washed up tidy,” Finnegan says. “David and I were always in and out of each other’s room in a perfectly normal, natural way. We’d had a relationship. So I went into his room and there I found a half-written song lying by his bedside. The lyrics were talking about ‘beautiful Angie.’ So the penny dropped. The next thing I knew he’d moved her in. Sensing I was miffed, Angie of course launched a formidable charm offensive. She was a very highly strung young woman. Openly bisexual, incredibly creative and formidably energetic and very beautiful. I think he was in love with her.”
Despite the powerful sexual attraction and what must have been a hint of narcissism (they were similarly built physically, had similar hair and skin color), Angela and David really bonded over a shared sense of ambition and drive. “He studied mime,” she says, impressed still, some four decades on. “To be with Hermione he learned ballet. I thought if he was that well versed and Ken Pitt had been making sure, as far as acting was concerned, he could do whatever we needed him to do, it made him different and my job was to market him. You start with what you’ve got and you work on that. He had this ability to pick up a skill. He was extremely talented. Please do not believe any of the bullshit about him. He’s very brilliant. He’s a multi-instrumentalist. And the focus that it takes to learn those things, I’m sure it was one of the reasons we were good together. You can’t have big ambitions and big dreams if you think the person that you’re dreaming them with can’t handle it. You know what I mean. You would fall flat on your face before you got out of the gate. So my dreams were inspired by him. Those dreams that I thought of putting together were because he had the goods.”
“David was ensnared by his first experience of meeting a female of that American pushy raucous coed bobby-soxer syndrome. He had never seen anything like it, whereas I had become acquainted with the species during my many visits to the U.S.,” Pitt writes me. “I did regret that she chose not to support me in my work for David but to do all she could to undermine it, all to her own personal advantage of course.”
“I have a very soft spot for Americans,” Ray Stevenson says. “They just do things where English people go, ‘Oh, that would be nice, but …’ And yet Angie was a bit pushy. A bit loud. What really blew it: we were up watching the moon landing and Angie decided she was going out for a walk. Came back a half hour later telling everyone, ‘I saw these little green men, they landed at the end of Foxgrove Road!’ What you expect from a three-year-old. Preposterous.”
What’s indisputable is that she put the Arts Lab in perspective and helped extricate Bowie from what might have been a terminal case of hippie navel-gazing. “The whole Arts Lab scene. I got so sick of it,” she says. “It’s so political. Just the mention of it flashes me back years and I’m right back in a ‘meeting’ arguing over who had kudos and who didn’t … it was a nightmare! I had a diploma in marketing and economics. I couldn’t do that bullshit. I’d look at them and say,
‘Look, the movement is just a marketing thing. Everyone who’s saying no to us, they’re idiots. The [older generation] had a world war. They killed all these people. We’ve got to reclaim the world.’ And it was a big deal for me. They shushed me a lot. I was written off as the intellectual.”
If Angie’s accelerated approach to empowerment clashed somewhat with the elliptical Arts Lab, her approach to the handling of Bowie ran head-on into Kenneth Pitt’s gentlemanly fifties-and-early-sixties-bred style. In July, Pitt had arranged several appearances designed to promote the “Space Oddity” single, including a “song festival” on the Italian island of Malta. Pitt was likely happy to be alone with David after the distance put between them thanks to Bowie’s less manageable stints in Feathers and at the Arts Lab. Despite the more contemporary, rockier material he’d been working on for the Space Oddity album sessions with Visconti (who was back on board after declining to produce the title track), Pitt suggested that David sing “When I Live My Dream” from the two-year-old Deram debut.
Angie flew home to visit her parents in Cyprus to tell them all about her new boyfriend. David sent her postcards from Italy while traveling with Pitt. Either put off by Pitt or in emotional need, he gave Angie the sense that her presence was missed. She talked her parents into booking an airplane ticket and soon, to Pitt’s chagrin, she was joining Bowie in Italy. Angie agreed with him about the relative dustiness of the old cabaret material. She even criticized the outfit Pitt had picked out for Bowie and loudly insisted that he start dressing in more modern gear.
“David was thrilled; Ken wasn’t,” she writes in Backstage Passes. “He had to find another room and I don’t think it was the inconvenience that really bothered him. Talk about a snit. And there’s nothing, thank God, like the ire of a queen whose affection has been spurned.”