by Paul Trynka
For all those involved, the eventual success of Scary Monsters was a poignant one. Even as a host of groups copied Scary Monsters’ gritty electro-funk mélange, most of those responsible, including drummer Dennis Davis and bassist George Murray, were looking for new jobs. But for a brief session in Berlin, Tony Visconti would not work with David again for another twenty-one years. ‘It is one of my favourite Bowie albums ever,’ the producer points out. ‘I considered it going out on a high note.’
For David, the album marked a happy change of setting; he had never officially left Berlin, but he was fired up by his return to New York, where he could hang with a younger generation of arty New Wavers, and also resumed his friendship with John and Yoko, under happier, more relaxed circumstances for both of them. John’s respect for David had only increased with the success of ‘Fame’, which had put the ex-Beatle back in the charts. David still considered John, alongside Mick Jagger, as his closest role model, but his admiration for John was not intermixed with rivalry, as it was with Mick. Lennon brought out a better side of David, and he knew it. Happily, John had started writing again. David admired the unique lifestyle he’d carved out, based around his and Yoko’s elegant, white-carpeted, minimally furnished apartment in The Dakota, by Central Park, where John and Yoko could wander, undisturbed.
As David was finishing what would become an enduring classic, he was starting work on another, more transient triumph. The Scary Monsters sessions were in full flow when he took a call from Jack Hofsiss, director of The Elephant Man, the play based on the life of Joseph Merrick, which David had seen in New York back in February. Hofsiss needed a replacement for Philip Anglim, who was quitting the title role. Bowie had been bowled over by the play; given just twenty-four hours to make his decision, he agreed to take on the part.
David spent time rehearsing with Hofsiss one-on-one before the cast convened for a fortnight of intensive work in San Francisco. His recruitment was quintessential celebrity casting, of the kind still practised today, so when David arrived at the Geary Theater the suspicion might have been that Bowie’s fellow actors would have resented being upstaged by an upstart rock ‘n’ roller. Especially Ken Ruta – stalwart of the American Conservatory Theatre, admirer of Gielgud and Tennessee Williams – who would play opposite him night after night as Doctor Frederick Treves, Merrick’s friend and benefactor. But Ruta is unequivocal about his leading man. ‘He was incredible. Right on the money.’
As one listens to the recollections of The Elephant Man cast, echoes abound of David’s time on the road with the Lindsay Kemp company, a dozen years before. Back then, Kemp points out, ‘he was not starry at all, by God no.’ Ruta is similarly emphatic: ‘He was absolutely not a show-off,’ an opinion shared by co-star Jeanette Landis. ‘He was a very pure actor. In fact, more professional than the actor he replaced.’
For just a few months, the setting echoed Bowie’s late teens, when he was soaking up experiences as part of Kemp’s tiny crew. With his upbringing among the imposing Victorian edifices of Brixton, or The Lower Third’s performances alongside the bearded lady side-shows of Margate, Bowie was well aware that the England that fêted and mocked Merrick still existed. Before rehearsals, David had visited the London Hospital to examine Merrick’s bones and the poignant cardboard church he’d constructed, which – in grander form – is a centrepiece of the play, a symbol of Merrick’s yearning for beauty and peace. Most of the actors in the play, including David, shared a sympathy for Merrick, heightened by the presence in the audience of people who sufferred from his condition. What they didn’t expect was to see such startling parallels between the life of Merrick, circus freak, and that of their leading man.
Parts of David’s routine were conventional. On a Sunday, he’d buy the New York Times and carefully read through the book reviews. Then, later in the week, he’d lay each of the books that had received raves out on a table in front of him; soon he would have read all of them. At the end of each week, there’d be a modest present, a token of affection, to his fellow actors. ‘It depended on your taste in diversion,’ says Ruta. ‘I usually got a nice bottle of red wine.’ Some days, once the play opened in Denver, he’d walk down to a little milk bar he’d found, just to relax or dance with some younger company.
He seemed to master the routine on stage easily, too. At first, there were plenty of little lapses, none of which affected the flow. ‘He hadn’t acted on a stage, so the acting technique wasn’t completely in his control,’ says Ruta, ‘[but], thank God, he had such an imagination, so the integrity was there. There was a basic honesty. And the best gift, to me, of any great actors is that thing about listening. That doesn’t happen all the time.’ It is an intriguing observation; for when making Low, or “Heroes”, what else had Bowie been doing but listening – picking out sounds and making sense of them?
His fellow actors found Bowie’s physical transformation into Merrick equally impressive: ‘He seemed to have captured that – better than all the other ones who wanted to be glamorous. He wasn’t doing glamour. He was doing Merrick,’ says Jeanette Landis. When Ken Ruta later watched John Hurt play Merrick, swamped under a prosthesis, in the movie of The Elephant Man, he found the experience far less involving than seeing David.
Even before David’s appearance, the play had been a success; US president Jimmy Carter was a fan of the book, and he and his wife had come to meet the first cast. Yet when David took over from Anglim, the upstart replacement lifted the play. ‘Whatever that thing is – it was nothing that is practised or manufactured – it was there,’ says Ruta. Variety’s review of the opening night in Denver bears out Ruta’s memories of the performance. ‘Bowie takes the stage with authority,’ the review commented. ‘Vocally, he is both quick and sensitive.’
When David had billed himself as ‘the actor’ on the sleeve of Hunky Dory, it had seemed a pretentious claim. Now he earned that title. In the nomadic world of the theatre, where actors make friendships then move on to the next production, he was a much more sympathetic figure to his colleagues, who rarely – like musicians – expect their working relationships to last. As far as the Denver and Chicago cast members were concerned, Bowie was ‘a honey. Kind, good, bright, and he worked for his money.’ Jeanette Landis, his leading woman, was equally impressed. ‘His talent was bigger than his ego – which is rare.’
Yet there was a divide between David and the other actors. It was a divide that was hardly perceptible in the week they spent in Denver, breaking the theatre’s box office record. But from the time the troupe hit Chicago on 5 August, 1980, Bowie’s companions were shocked by the conditions in which he was forced to live. Like Merrick, he lived the life of a freak. ‘It was fun in Denver, which was more or less the Hinterlands. In Chicago, it was scary,’ says Ruta. ‘Mobs of people, unrelenting.’ Jeanette Landis, too, remembers, ‘It was out of control.’
Within days, David was forced to travel to the Blackstone Theatre in a garbage truck, sneaking in and out of the building via a basement window. With fans stalking the city’s main hotels, he stayed instead in a flat above a nearby department store. Only a couple of cast members knew its location. At one point during the run, most of his clothes were stolen: ‘He just had a tacky T-shirt, a pair of jeans and a cardboard suitcase,’ says Ruta. ‘It was the most horrible, horrible life.’
The incessant attention from the fans, seen at close quarters, was terrifying because it was relentless. Throughout the Chicago run it would never let up. For the first time in their careers, Ruta and Landis worked closely with security guards, hired to protect the cast. In this context, Coco, seen as intrusive by so many of David’s musicians, was ‘a protectress’, says Ruta. ‘Wonderful. She took care of him.’
After the first few days, the cast would look over the first few rows as soon as they walked on stage, wondering who would be there. One night a fan left an object on the stage: ‘Leave it, don’t touch it,’ Bowie told Ruta, as they snatched a few words in the wings. Caught up in the feverish
, intimidating atmosphere, Ruta obeyed him.
Towards the end of the Chicago run, Ruta spotted one distinctive gaggle of fans in the front row. ‘About six girls, all weird looking, this was before punk became crazy, all with dyed hair, all holding purses in their laps.’ They were there throughout the week, for the Saturday matinee, and again for the evening performance. Then, as the actors took the curtain call at the end of the performance, all six girls rose, carrying their purses, and headed for the stage. ‘It was instantaneous, they were all tackled from the sides by I don’t know how many plain-clothes men. And they were carrying something in their purses, metallic – they were there to do something dirty. It was just coo-coo that night.’ The girls were bundled out of the building by security and Ruta never found out their intentions, but he is convinced they had set out to scare David – or worse.
When the show transferred to New York on 23 September, 1980 – after a two-week break for rehearsals and the installation of a higher-profile supporting cast – the media frenzy intensified, and the curtain opened to a star-studded audience including Christopher Isherwood, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Aaron Copland and David’s Montreux neighbour – and supposed lover – Oona Chaplin. The New York reviews were generally effusive or respectful, and with Scary Monsters nestled at number one in the UK chart, and twelve in the USA, Bowie finally seemed to have reached the status of cross-cultural figurehead to which, despite too many protestations, he obviously aspired. John, Yoko, Iggy, Esther and May Pang were among the friends who pressed at the dressing-room door after the first performances, enthusing over his theatrical debut. Throughout the month, journalists from weighty tomes, from the New York Times, to London papers The Times and Sunday Times, queued up for their allotted fifteen minutes, invigilated by Barbara and Tim Dewitt. In several of the interviews, he extolled the anonymity of New York; like his friend John, he loved how you could walk the city unmolested. ‘The most you get is, “Hi Dave, how’s it going?”’ he told The Times’ Patricia Barnes.
It was 8 December, exactly two weeks after The Times interview appeared, that May Pang called David Bowie’s Chelsea apartment to tell him she’d heard that John Lennon had been shot dead by Mark Chapman. Coco answered the phone. ‘David is out, on a date,’ she told May. ‘Get down here, now. You shouldn’t be alone.’
David arrived at the apartment around the same time as May. She remembers him screaming, ‘WHAT THE HELL, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THIS WORLD!’ over and over, angry, devastated, numb. At times, for all of them, there were flashbacks, or momentary convictions that this was a prank, and hadn’t really happened; again and again they’d tell each other, ‘We have to be calm, we can’t let our emotions take over.’ After he’d screamed himself to a numb acceptance, David sat in front of the TV, absorbed by the news footage of distraught fans milling around The Dakota building and Central Park. He was still up when May Pang left the apartment around dawn. New York was strangely quiet as she walked home.
David played out most of the three remaining weeks of The Elephant Man, missing several nights. It was ‘awful, just awful’, he would explain two years later. ‘A whole piece of my life seemed to have been taken away; a whole reason for being a singer and songwriter seemed to be removed from me. It was almost like a warning.’ There were rumours, never substantiated, that Mark Chapman had attended a performance of The Elephant Man, or that he’d written down a list of targets which included David Bowie and Keith Richards. Whatever the truth, the murder of the one man in New York with whom he most identified left David with only one option: flight.
18
Snapshot of a Brain
I’ve never worked with an artist like that before or since. It was all beautiful images. We went to people’s houses that he knew had certain things … it was like fact finders, treasure hunters, conquistadores looking for gold.
Nile Rodgers
Just three years before, the main fixtures in David’s life had been rock-star buddies and enfant terrible artists, his main entertainment boozing and exploring bullet-riddled hotspots. In the summer of 1981, this was a distant memory. In its place were calm walks in the heights above Lake Geneva, and civilised drinks with Eugene Chaplin: a cheery, relaxed character who looked like a rather more rotund version of his celebrated comedian father. Most novel of all, David’s house resounded to the hubbub of kids.
For several years now, Zowie’s social life had revolved around making friends with the children of musicians or studio staff, all under the devoted care of Marion Skene, the nanny who’d taken care of him for nearly eight years. Although Zowie had stayed with David for much of the Berlin period, he was more than conscious of how his often absentee role affected his son. Now, in the tiny family’s last summer in the house at Corsiersur-Vevey, Zowie had unhindered access to his dad – and David’s array of video equipment. Later, he’d vividly recall using his father’s broadcast-quality U-Matic tape recorder, the size of a shopping trolley, for Star Wars parties at which he and his friends would watch George Lucas’s films, with each film spread across two or three tapes. It was the first time the ten-year-old had enjoyed a proper chance to make friends – although it turned out the idyllic sojourn would be relatively brief, for David – a conventional father – later enrolled him at the notoriously spartan boarding school Gordonstoun, a favourite of English royalty.
Zowie’s education was a typical example of the conservatism hidden behind David’s supposedly unconventional exterior; in this respect, as in several others, he seemed to show the influence of his own father. Even in his Haddon Hall days David had surprised friends, like Mark Pritchett, when it turned out Mark had skipped a school athletics event. ‘You should have gone to that – it’s important,’ David had admonished him. As a father, he was definitely of the ‘you won’t get your pudding till you’ve eaten your vegetables’ school, but not bossy – he’d reason with Zowie, almost like he was a friend. As for real friends, they were few. Iggy would call and ask his advice, but there were no real peers David could call on when he was in the same position. Corinne was the most zealous, but eventually David came to the conclusion he didn’t make friends that easily. Later in life, he’d realise that the only friends who stayed with him were those he’d known in Bromley, people like the kind, unflappable George Underwood: ‘There are about half a dozen [friends] that I would think of as close in the accepted sense, i.e. would I reach out to them in a time of real crisis?’ he would tell his wife Iman, many years later, reflecting on how his males friends in that group ‘all go back to my teenage years’.
Isolated, but for Zowie, in Switzerland, David turned to professionals for help. His visceral, encompassing fear in the wake of Lennon’s murder was ‘not at all an affectation – it was real’, according to those who knew him. While Keith Richards started carrying a gun, David hired a new bodyguard, this time one who was literally trained to kill. His main muscle was named Gary, an ex-Navy SEAL. It turned out that in his time with David, Gary never got to demonstrate his talent for despatching people using only a spoon or other household implement, so he’d fill in the time by running flabby, thirty-something rock musos from David’s band through fitness routines between overdubs in the studio.
Next, David started to rethink every aspect of his own relationship with his fans. He found and attended a course which trained media figures on how to deal with the public: it showed how to deal with casual encounters on the street, and mapped out danger signs in letters or other communications – code-words that signified latent stalkers or killers. Stars were advised not to respond to some cues; in extreme cases, they were told to change their address.
David’s own fan correspondence, it turned out, was packed with the danger signs. One such letter, from several fans writing together, opened with the typical comments about lyrics, make-up and fashion. Several letters later, his correspondents had progressed to informing him of a friend’s death – ‘We don’t blame you,’ they informed him. When David showed the letter to hi
s advisers, they told him to move house.
David’s new-found awareness of his own mortality not only inspired him to spend more time with Zowie, he also re-established contact with his own mother. He and Peggy stayed together over Christmas 1980, and remained in regular contact from then on. ‘I’ve gotten closer to her,’ he remarked later. ‘I think the recognition of the frailty of age makes one more sympathetic to the earlier strains of the parent–child relationship.’ In contrast, Zowie’s interaction with Angie was limited. David and Angie had fought a lengthy battle through the Swiss courts, with Angie represented by celebrated ‘palimony’ lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, who later claimed to have climbed a Swiss mountain in pursuit of Bowie. It was a tough case, with witnesses like Marion Skene testifying to Angie’s maternal shortcomings. Faced with such opposition, Mitchelson secured a settlement of just $700,000 when the divorce was finalised in February 1980: a derisory figure from today’s perspective for a woman who was undoubtedly crucial to the creation of Ziggy. Once a ten-year gagging order on discussing the divorce had expired, Angie blamed Corinne for most of her troubles, accusing Schwab of first floating the notion of a move to Switzerland, so David could take advantage of its sexist legal regime.
Angie’s anger at Coco seemed to outweigh her grief at losing Zowie, for her contact with him was limited by the terms of the settlement. The years following her divorce were torrid ones. By 1983, twelve-year-old Zowie had taken the name Joey, and in the summer of 1984, after staying with Angie and boyfriend Drew Blood at their Lower East Side tenement, he decided to break off contact with his mother. Angie blamed David – ‘he used his millions to poison Zowie against me’ – but Tony Zanetta, who was there for Joey and Marion Skene’s visit over a sweltering New York summer, witnessed messy scenes culminating in a screaming match. ‘It was hard for him … maybe if Angie had devoted herself to him that summer … It was very sad.’ Whether or not David helped inspire Joey’s estrangement from his mother, he made little effort to conceal how much he detested his ex-wife, whom he described as having ‘as much insight into the human condition as a walnut and a self-interest that would make Narcissus green with envy’.