Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  26.

  FOR MUCH OF THE late eighties, Bowie was in something of a steady relationship with a younger woman named Melissa Hurley. Hurley, born in New England in 1966, the year David Jones became David Bowie, was a dancer with a slim, elegant build and thick brown hair. They’d met during rehearsals for the Glass Spider tour, as she was in the Peter Frampton–vexing dance troupe. While the relationship with Hurley lasted longer than both his time with Ava Cherry and the happy years of Bowie’s marriage to Angie (roughly 1970–1973), the difference in age and, in light of Bowie’s remarkable life, experience proved the relationship’s undoing. Bowie described it as “one of those older men, younger girl situations where I had the joy of taking her around the world and showing her things. But it became obvious to me that it just wasn’t going to work out as a relationship and for that she would thank me one of these days.” Then Bowie met Iman, the supermodel whose regally high forehead, smoky voice and impossibly long legs were already as iconic in her field as Bowie’s mismatched pupils and flair for shape-shifting were in his own. Bowie and Iman were set up on a blind date by a hairdresser and mutual friend at the start of the nineties, who correctly assumed that she had a better chance of holding her own.

  If you didn’t know anything about Iman (and I knew virtually nothing about her before starting this project except that she was in Michael Jackson’s “Do You Remember the Time” video) or were up late one night channel-surfing and happened to see her selling Iman Global Chic products (glossy faux-reptile handbags with “fashion planners” described by her cohost as a “patent croc explosion”), you might incorrectly assume that she was, like most models are perceived to be, a somewhat humorless beanpole with a foreign accent whom people like Halston and Calvin Klein drape material over. But those who have spent time with her insist to me that she is funny, even bawdy at times, and completely accessible as opposed to accessorized. Given her upbringing in the Republic of Somalia, the ancient African country with a history of strife and political upheaval (it’s currently known as a source of tanker-plundering pirates), she is both a political and humanitarian activist, and not just in that fashion-y “real crocodile accessories are cruel” way. Her improbable career path makes Bowie’s rise from lower-middle-class mod to global superstar seem like a relative cake-walk. Born Iman Abdulmajid in 1955, by the late sixties she was set to be married to a wealthy older man but fled the arranged marriage. Her father was a diplomat and the family was forced to leave their home in Mogadishu when the government was overthrown by a military coup d’etat in 1969. They lived modestly in exile in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, where Iman studied political science, reading about both the Kennedys and the Black Panthers, gazing admiringly at the visiting Peace Corps officers and fantasizing about America. In Kenya, she was discovered by famous fashion photographer Peter Beard, who spotted her in her casual wear (not herding cattle in the middle of the jungle as was later reported) and requested to take her picture. Iman only agreed to pose for Beard if he’d pay for her fall tuition at the university. He agreed. Like Bowie, she was instinctively adept at the spin of media manipulation, and when Beard returned to the States and spread the word about his “native” discovery who spoke no English, she played along for a time. Signed to the Wilhelmina modeling agency, her in-your-face ethnicity was embraced by designers and challenged audiences and critics in Europe and America to hold her back.

  Both a party girl and careerist, by the late eighties, Iman was divorced from Seattle Supersonics basketball legend Spencer Haywood. She had a fully grown daughter, Zulekha; a personal fortune from modeling; a thriving cosmetics line geared toward black women; and a series of models, from Naomi Campbell to Veronica Webb and Tyra Banks, who held her up as a trailblazer and barrier smasher within their industry. Although ten years Bowie’s junior, Iman had few wild oats left to sow when they were first fixed up in October of 1990. They’d met over the years, but it seemed like both were finally ready to experiment with the kind of domesticity that ambition and fate had kept them from when they were in their respective twenties in the early seventies and eighties.

  “I saw her about three or four times at different social functions,” Bowie told Hello magazine in 1992. “Once was in the theatre when we leaned over several people and shook hands. I then saw her briefly at a gig in Los Angeles, and so on. Both of us had just, in the last few months, ended previous relationships. For my part, I felt that was it, for me—I didn’t want, need or desire any more permanent relationships.” Iman herself was wary and reportedly played hard-to-get at first. Still, the timing was right and the chemistry was real. Courtship became a sort of art project in itself. Every month, on the fourteenth (the day they met in October) they’d have mini “anniversaries,” and friends of the pair commented that they were acting like lovestruck teenagers. While David proposed marriage to Angela over the telephone, he popped the question to Iman only a few months after that first date during a romantic boat ride around the Seine, choreographed for maximum romanticism. There under a drizzling rain in the Parisian moonlight, he asked her to marry him.

  The wedding of these two world-famous firebrands would actually be quite traditional, down to the month, June of 1992. In an effort to avoid a media blitz, the press were thrown a curveball when it was leaked that the ceremony would take place on the island of Mustique. It actually took place in Florence at the St. James Episcopal Church. Seventy or so guests, including Brian Eno, Eric Idle of Monty Python, Bono and Yoko Ono, were put up at the local Villa Massa hotel, a four-hundred-year-old mansion on the banks of the Arno River. David’s mother, Peggy, now in her seventies, flew over from London to represent the groom’s family, along with David’s son, Duncan, then twenty-one. Iman’s father, mother and two brothers represented the bride. Her maid of honor was her best friend, fashion model Bethann Hardison. In another bow to tradition, the bride and the groom did not see each other before the ceremony. An atmosphere of intimacy was achieved inside, but outside the church, as word slowly got around, a crowd of about a thousand locals surrounded the building, and after the brief ceremony (which featured original music written by Bowie for the event), they required a police escort to drive them back to the hotel, where the reception, with dinner, disco dancing and a fireworks display on the water, was to begin. Despite the lavish wedding, by many accounts, Iman had a quieting and calming effect on Bowie’s affairs. She was not considered as theatrical as Angie or as polarizing as Coco Schwab and relied on her independent star power and charisma to get things done within this new Bowie circle (in which Schwab remained but was perhaps no longer the go-to consultant, what with a spouse well-versed in the entertainment business immediately at Bowie’s side). Bowie and Iman instantly became a power couple, magnifying their mutual celebrity stock. He gave her a sense of art-wise rock ’n’ roll edge and she introduced him to the high-fashion world where he was already a touchstone but perhaps not a traveler. Both wore these new coats well.

  “Road life was a lot more fun,” Tin Machine’s Reeves Gabrels says of the band’s 1992 tour in support of their sophomore album (which contains a killer version of “If There Is Something,” from Roxy Music’s debut). “Iman was a nice leveler. David got to read a lot and make up his mind about a lot of things on his own, as opposed to having a personal assistant read it. Iman protected him from the influence of those around him who would rather do other things because it suited their schedule. It had been a very Byzantine world [before that].”

  Tin Machine released a live album culled from their club tour in support of Tin Machine II. In 1990, U2 entered Berlin’s Hansa Studios where Bowie had recorded “Heroes” a decade and a half earlier, albeit during a much different political climate. Eno, well into his relationship with the band, again engineered a Bowie-style total image and sonic makeover. The resulting masterwork Achtung Baby was released in 1991. It was both a massive commercial success and remains their creative high point. With typical snark, the kind Gary Numan fell victim to a decade earlier, Bowie
christened Tin Machine’s live effort Oy Vey, Baby. Like Numan, U2 was hugely reverential, but the fact that both these artists were raking in the cash by modifying the Bowie model must have been a little galling. Bowie was not yet the wealthy man he’d become in the late nineties. He was merely another rich British rock star living in Rolling Stones–style virtual tax exile. Let’s Dance was coming on a decade old, and that had really been his last substantial hit record. The Serious Moonlight and Glass Spider tours were blockbusters, but the latter had a tremendous overhead and its critical drubbing had lowered his stock. Tin Machine was certainly not going to bring home the roast. Bowie lived in Switzerland and at times kept residences in Los Angeles and Manhattan but soon decided to find a permanent residence with Iman in New York. Any new husband, whether he’s David Bowie or not, wants to help feather a nest. A marriage—like having a child or caring for an aging and ill parent or watching a child become an adult, as now college-aged Duncan had—shakes one’s sense of gravity, and the natural response is to pay a bit more mind to money in the mattress.

  “There was always a lot of pressure to make money,” Gabrels says. “These money guys didn’t get what David was doing at all, but they were really good at making money and David liked money. It was also time to change after three Tin Machine records.” Gabrels’s assessment of Bowie’s advisers at the time may indeed be sound, but it’s hard to fault any business manager for thinking that a quick conduit to another massive hit would be something as simple as reuniting Bowie with Nile Rodgers, producer of his biggest-selling album to date, Let’s Dance. Surely there is an element of logic to this, and Bowie’s new label, Savage Records, was happy to pony up a large advance at the prospect of another Let’s Dance. Hollywood has basically run on the theory for a century, and whether it’s Hepburn and Tracy or DiCaprio and Winslet, they will continue to do so, forgetting each time that you can’t re-create a zeitgeist. Let’s Dance was a moment in culture a decade and a half in the making, not merely a hit record. After virtually building modern British pop and videogenic theatricality, it was Bowie’s time to be honored by the masses. There’s also the crucial matter of, well … good material. You can put Allen and Keaton up on a screen, but without the inspiration you have Manhattan Murder Mystery rather than Annie Hall. Like Let’s Dance, Black Tie White Noise, Bowie’s next studio effort and a reunion with Nile Rodgers as producer, sounded great. Unlike Let’s Dance, the songwriting was just okay, and the special guests (like lightweight R & B heartthrob Al B. Sure!) felt like relevance gambits as opposed to exciting showcases for unknown megatalents like Stevie Ray Vaughn had been. Ironically, Duran Duran would fall victim to the same thing fifteen years later, counterbalancing middle age with Justin Timberlake and superproducer Timbaland on their Red Carpet Massacre album. In a Record Collector interview from the period, Bowie is actually asked the following question: “In the past, you’ve sung with people like Mick Jagger, Freddie Mercury, Tina Turner and John Lennon. How did you enjoy working with Al B.?”

  “We used to laugh about Nile Rodgers and then it’s funny he goes back and works with him,” Hunt Sales says. “Nile Rodgers did a great fucking job at a time and a place with Let’s Dance. I won’t dispute that. Nile Rodgers is a very talented guy. His idea to work with him was to recapture what they had, but that’s bullshit. You can never go home again.”

  If nothing else, Black Tie White Noise is historic in that it also reunited Bowie with Mick Ronson, if not his greatest guitar foil, what with rivals in Alomar and Gabrels, certainly the sentimental favorite. Ronson had, in 1992, reminded those who may have forgotten in the intervening years since Transformer just how bang-up a producer he could be by working with Morrissey on Your Arsenal, widely considered the high point of the ex-Smiths front man’s solo work. This achievement was not lost on Bowie, who covers Morrissey’s towering “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” on Black Tie. He also knew that Ronson had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and only had a few months to live. “Mick was not a drug user,” his widow, Suzi, says. “He hated pot. I think the illness might have been a product of his drinking. He was a very serious drinker. I think he drank a bottle of spirits a day. I never realized how serious it was. When word got out that he was [gravely ill] it was ‘Let’s get the last record out of Mick before he dies.’ ‘Come down and play on my album.’ They all knew he was on his way out.” Suzi Ronson stresses that Morrissey, an avowed fan of Ronson’s work with Bowie and Reed, merely wanted to make a stonking, glitter-informed guitar record, but her take on Bowie’s motivations is a bit more suspicious. “We were going down there for a nice little quiet session [with David] and then when we got there there were cameras. Mick wasn’t feeling very good that day. He was really ill during those sessions.” From one perspective it may be seen as exploitative, but such terrible news causes a jumble of emotions and memories, and Bowie, who did return the favor by contributing vocals to Ronson’s cover of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” was surely sentimental. This version appears on Ronson’s final solo album.

  Ever the northern pragmatist, Ronson decided that the best way to cope with the new was to keep working and began recording a new solo effort, entitled, with typically English gallows wit, Heaven and Hull. “The T. J. Martell Foundation gave him a record deal when he knew he only had three months to live,” Suzi says. “It gave him something to think about apart from dying of cancer. Go to the studio and lose himself in his music.” He died just days after the release of Bowie’s new album. He was only forty-seven years old. While promoting Black Tie White Noise Bowie did remember Ronson on national television, telling talk show host Arsenio Hall, somewhat sheepishly, “The band the Spiders from Mars—that was the whole situation that sort of got me the kind of fame I had in the seventies. The lead guitarist for that band was Mick Ronson, and unfortunately, tragically he succumbed to cancer three or four days ago, and in his passing, I want to say that of all the early seventies guitar players Mick was probably one of the most influential and profound, and I miss him a lot.” Hall, as was his practice, nodded obsequiously.

  As with all of Bowie’s lesser work, there are flashes of brilliance on Black Tie. “The Wedding” is a rare instance of Bowie’s unguarded emotion and euphoria over his marriage to Iman, and with its Arabic flourishes, it neatly unifies their respective backgrounds, Western pop and Somalia. “Jump They Say,” the lead single, with lyrics that, like those of “All the Madmen,” continued to address Terry Burns’s sad legacy, was, by contrast, authentically dark (if you discount the Mark Romanek–directed music video, which is pure fashion). Although it topped the British charts, it was not the Let’s Dance--style commercial comeback the money men had handicapped it to be. Worse, the album was completely upstaged by the release of Angie’s memoir Backstage Passes and her intimation on the Joan Rivers and Howard Stern shows (Iggy Pop, of all people, was the other guest on Stern’s show and refused to remain in the studio with her) that she’d caught David in bed with Mick Jagger. And yet none of this seemed to matter. Bowie’s back catalog music simply refused to give up the ghost and join other “oldies” from the seventies in the classic rock pasture. A third wave of rediscovery, following post-punk and New Wave, came as those indie rockers who realized they could never look like Bowie started selling millions of records—which did much to bolster their “Hey, maybe I could be Bowie after all” confidence. Dinosaur Jr. did a faithful cover of “Quicksand” off Hunky Dory, turning his fans on to an album that they might have never found. Most famously, in the winter of 1994, completely unsolicited, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain reminded anyone who needed reminding in the wake of another disappointing Bowie album that Bowie was foremost a songwriting genius. During the band’s taping of the MTV series Unplugged in New York City, surrounded by orchids and candles, Cobain sang “The Man Who Sold the World.” He read the lyrics from a piece of paper on a stand but that didn’t diminish the feeling that this was some kind of valediction. Dressed in a pale green cardigan, surrounded by his ba
nd with cello accompaniment, Cobain demonstrated the versatility of the then twenty-five-year-old song. Bowie praised it as a good “straightforward” version and after Cobain’s death, he added it to his live set list.

  “I was at a Bowie concert in 1995,” says Moby today of Bowie’s tour the following year alongside Nine Inch Nails. “The only older songs he played were ‘Scary Monsters’ and ‘The Man Who Sold the World.’ He was playing ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and the kid next to me said to his friend, ‘Wow, this is cool. He’s playing a Nirvana song.’ It was all I could do not to throttle him.”

  Perhaps Bowie’s finest album of the 1990s is his most obscure. Bowie’s soundtrack to the 1993 BBC miniseries The Buddha of Suburbia, based on the novel by Hanif Kureishi, barely even appears in the film (which is mostly driven by pop songs, including vintage Bowie). The book, the sexually charged account of a young Indian man from Bromley caught between the old world and the new who moves to London, discovers punk, grapples with racism and turns to theater to discover his own identity touched Bowie. “It made him laugh,” Kureishi says. “Reminded him of his own youth.” Kureishi and Bowie became friendly during the making of the film adaptation, with the icon taking pains to make the author, a superfan, feel at ease.

  Bowie and Erdal Kizilcay watched the film (which stars Naveen Andrews, later the star of the hit TV series Lost, as Kureishi’s alter ego Karim) over and over again in his Swiss recording studio while writing the music. “He would talk to me about Brixton,” Kizilcay says. “How his mother worked in a movie theater. I would tell him about Istanbul. We really understood each other. The Buddha of Suburbia comes from that and from his connection with Hanif.”