by Wendy Leigh
Along the way he paid court to Monique van Vooren (twenty years his senior), had an affair with Dana Gillespie (who was then fourteen to his sixteen) and a dalliance with Cyrinda Foxe (a glamorous Monroe doppelgänger who sported a string of pearls she put to good use during their last sexual encounter), and—in the spirit of his continuing rivalry with Mick Jagger—toyed with Jagger’s onetime girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, backing singer Claudia Lennear (the inspiration for Mick Jagger’s song “Brown Sugar,” and about whom David wrote “Lady Grinning Soul”), and briefly dated Mick’s first wife, Bianca Jagger.
According to David’s ex-wife, Angie, who has hawked a variety of negative stories about David since their divorce, there may also have been more than a moment with Mick Jagger himself. In Angie Bowie’s version of the alleged event, first published in her 1981 autobiography, Free Spirit, she returned from a trip to find Mick and David in bed together, only not sleeping, something which David has taken the rare step of denying. However, David’s girlfriend in the early seventies, Wilhelmina model Winona Williams, also says, “I remember walking in on David and Mick, and tending to think that they had just finished doing something together.”
Other of his conquests—never denied—include Susan Sarandon; Tina Turner; Lulu; Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes; one of the Three Degrees; Ralph Horton, his second manager; and possibly Ken Pitt, his third manager, who was clearly in love with him, although there is no conclusive evidence that their relationship was ever consummated.
Sexually voracious, David conducted simultaneous affairs with dancer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp and Natasha Korniloff, Kemp’s costume designer. He also had a much-publicized affair with transsexual Romy Haag, and affairs with sundry staff employees of MainMan (the company that spearheaded his onslaught on America), consolidating a pattern repeatedly characterized by observers as being David’s way of marking out his territory, and with an array of groupies both male and female, as well. As he put it in a 1997 BBC radio interview, “I was hitting on everybody. I had a wonderfully irresponsible promiscuous time.”
David’s sexual adventures—some partly cocaine-fueled, all ignited by his unbridled appetites and his propensity to cast a wide net, coupled with his unlimited opportunities—typifies his generation’s newfound ability to live out their wildness. His sexuality aside, David Bowie, the real man behind the image, is a wily operator, a hardheaded businessman, knowledgeable about the star-making factory that was the Hollywood studio system, and thus the first rock star to market himself as if he were a movie star. A consummate showman, he is the Barnum & Bailey of his time; a man with a magpie mentality—the living embodiment of T. S. Eliot’s famous line “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”—a cruiser of all aspects of popular culture; a synthesizer of the arts, style, and fashion; and, above all, the Emperor of Rock.
Yet while his unrivaled sense of style and cool may well be the product of an innate iciness within his deepest nature, throughout his life he has also formed abiding relationships with a number of people, and in this, as in his art, he exhibits yet another contradiction. Through it all, to paraphrase the La Cage aux Folles anthem “I Am What I Am,” Bowie has definitely always been his own special creation.
But here at David’s wedding to Iman, there isn’t the slightest whiff of the cross-dresser, the chameleon, or the unconventional about him. He is dashing in his Thierry Mugler black tie and tails, with Iman breathtakingly beautiful by his side. The only sign that David isn’t a five-times-married Beverly Hills billionaire banker or a dissolute Russian oligarch pledging his troth in a romantic, opulent wedding ceremony is the diamond stud in his left ear, and his openhearted love for his wife, his joy at their union.
“This for me is so exciting and so invigorating,” David said. “I have such great expectations of our future together. I have never been so happy.”
Twenty-two years after their marriage, David Bowie and Iman are still happy together, their initial conjugal bliss complete with the birth of their daughter, Alexandria, in 2000. Today, David and his family spend most of their time in Manhattan, with David, the consummate husband and father, besotted by both his wife and his daughter, as well as with Duncan (born Zowie) his grown son by his first marriage, who is now an award-winning movie director and very much part of David’s life.
Professionally, he still hasn’t lost his touch. Out of the blue, at 5 A.M. on the morning of his January 8, 2013, his sixty-sixth birthday without any prior warning, he unleashed “Where Are We Now?” on an unsuspecting public to great acclaim, followed in just two months by his much-feted album, his first in ten years, The Next Day. And the subsequent outpouring of praise for and adoration of David amongst the press, the public, and most of all his peers was unprecedented.
“In the music business there is an aura of great respect around David,” says music publicist Mick Garbutt, who has worked with him sporadically through the years.
David Bowie has climbed so very far, to the heights of fame and fortune, in every field that he has succeeded in conquering: He is a rock god whose story may seem like a moonlit fairy tale but simultaneously echoes the path, the choices, the triumphs, the disasters, and the lives lived by so many of his generation.
And it all began for him so long ago when he was just a kid in South London, where he began the journey that, by dint of his genius, his persistence, and his sheer hard work, would transform him into a global icon whose name, image, music, and artistry would endure forever.
ONE
ABSOLUTE BEGINNING
David Bowie’s first hit, “Space Oddity,” followed by “Life on Mars?” and “Starman,” insured that he would be forever associated with the planets, space, the moon, and the stars—and later on, when he made his cinematic debut in The Man Who Fell to Earth, with aliens and other worlds. Yet David Bowie was born in what in 1947 was one of the most mundane, down-to-earth, run-down communities in Britain: Brixton, in the London borough of Lambeth, a poor, grimy, working-class enclave. Yet stark and ordinary as Brixton was in those days, in true contrasting Bowie fashion, David’s birthplace also carried the visual blueprint of some of his creative dreams, his fantasies, his lyrics, his future.
As history tells us, during the Second World War German bombs didn’t drop on London’s historic landmarks, like Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Documents have revealed that after double agents planted deliberate misinformation within the Luftwaffe, the Germans set the coordinates of the flying bombs so they didn’t fall on Central London and destroy England’s most hallowed historic edifices, but rather on the East End and South London, which bore the brunt of the bombing.
Between October 1940 and June 1941, 1,215 bombs fell on Lambeth, an area three miles wide and seven miles long. And there was worse to come. Toward the end of the war, the lethal V-1 pilotless flying bombs (aka buzz bombs or doodlebugs) wrought havoc on London. At exactly 7:47 A.M. on July 16, 1944, a V-1 bomb hit Rumsey Road just one street north of Stansfield Road, where David Robert Jones (aka David Bowie) would be born just over two and a half years later, and in the process, demolished twelve houses and damaged forty others.
The ravages of that deadly attack (along with the hundreds of other bombs dropped on the Brixton area during the Second World War) were in evidence within a few miles’ radius of David’s home and would remain there well into the early fifties, when most of the houses were replaced with prefabricated reinforced concrete bungalows, known as “prefabs.” Hurriedly thrown-together eyesores with seemingly paper-thin walls, prefabs rose up from bombsites that resembled the desolate craters on the surface of the moon: forbidding, barren, like some bleak mysterious planet—all grist for David’s creativity.
Then there was the dark and sinister men’s prison, Brixton Prison, situated 0.8 miles from David’s home, where no less a luminary than Mick Jagger would be incarcerated for three nights after his drug bust, and where Anthony Newley, one of David’s earliest mus
ical influences, spent twenty-eight days after being convicted of driving with a suspended license.
And the local movie theater, the Astoria, was a palatial mock renaissance-style monstrosity, complete with marble foyer and mosaic fountain, that may well have been the first example of architectural excess and opulence David would have encountered in his young life. Perhaps even more of a dramatic and lasting influence, located ten minutes by foot from David’s birthplace, was Brixton Market, the hub of Brixton’s thousands of Jamaican immigrants, the first wave of which first arrived in London in the year of David’s birth, all bringing with them the sounds, textures, and colors of the Caribbean.
Just across from the hallowed halls of Bon Marché, Brixton’s sober department store, Electric Avenue and Granville Arcade were at the heart of acres and acres of covered market filled with stalls spilling over with mangoes, plantains, yams, pineapples, bolts of crimson lace, purple linens, coral lipsticks, glistening cocoa butter, and platinum nylon wigs, all sold by Jamaican barrow boys to the tinkling sound of Caribbean steel bands.
The spiritual, cultural, and commercial center of the Jamaican immigrant community in Brixton, Brixton Market was also a hive of beautiful Jamaican women, selling, buying, or just simply stalking through the market like Rocketts sporting multicolored flared feathers: all, short, young, old, hips swaying, voluptuous bodies swathed tightly in Technicolor cotton clothes, intoxicating, mesmerizing, and indelibly memorable.
A segue back to America, to Hollywood, and to a vignette from the life of David Bowie, age thirty, an artist at the top of his game, an Adonis at the height of his physical beauty, and a rock star still intent on sampling as great an assortment of the sexual fruits of his stratospheric success as possible.
By 1977, Elizabeth Taylor and David had bonded, and consequently, when he was performing in Los Angeles, she invited him to meet one of her close friends. Her name was Loretta Young, and in her day she was one of America’s most beloved movie stars, and an Oscar-nominated actress. Her costars included Cary Grant and Clark Gable, who was also her lover, and with whom she had a daughter.
Once a household name, due to her eponymous TV show, Loretta Young was now sixty-four, long past her prime, yet still a great, if faded, beauty. She was vibrant and vivacious and, despite her age, her sexual appetites remained undimmed.
Moreover, her considerable carnal desires were now directed obsessively at David Bowie. “All she had seen was his photographs, but she was enamored by him, fixated on him, and said to me, ‘I want to meet him. I want to be with him. Can you arrange it?’ ” Elizabeth Taylor confided to Kim Fowley, who then went on to detail her response. “I told Loretta that David wasn’t due in L.A. for a few months, and she said, ‘Good, that gives me time to prepare,’ ” Elizabeth Taylor reported.
According to Elizabeth Taylor, the David-obsessed Loretta proceeded to spend the next few months feverishly preparing herself for her first meeting with him.
“She started an exercise regime, she had her hair restyled, had some nips and tucks on her body and her face; then the big day came,” Elizabeth said. “I took Loretta to meet David. And assuming that it would be a foregone conclusion that she and David would immediately disappear into the night together, Loretta was very aggressive and said, ‘I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to meet you tonight, David.’ ”
Whereupon David, who had always had a propensity for strong women, but not aggressive ones, declared to Loretta Young in his polite English gentleman’s tone, “You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble, my dear. I only like black women and Asian men.”
Long after David’s birth at 40 Stansfield Road, a three-story terraced house, mythology had it that the midwife who delivered him swooned about his “knowing eyes” and insisted that the newborn baby had “been here before.” The baby David’s otherworldliness is the first of the many myths attached to David Bowie, perhaps by his father, John Haywood Jones, a seasoned public-relations man who devoted his considerable talents to raising David’s profile, or by subsequent publicists, or possibly by David himself, always his own best publicist, willing to spin untruths into truth, all in quest of lending luster to his image and his career.
But even if the midwife’s reaction was contrived and merely a publicity ploy, the truth is that David’s birth did have an otherworldly significance to it, one that would become clear only a few months before his tenth birthday, when Elvis Presley burst onto the scene with “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” thus becoming the world’s first rock idol whose megawatt rock-god appeal has never waned: David Bowie was born on January 8, 1947, Elvis Presley’s twelfth birthday. David’s mother, Peggy, no mean judge of male charisma, was overcome when Elvis flooded the radio with hits, and she viewed the fact that David shared his birthday as a positive omen. As David said, “She never let me forget it. She was enthralled by the idea.”
David himself was not immune to the significance of sharing a birthday with Elvis, and it added to his sense of his own destiny, his own specialness. Consequently, when he watched his aunt Una’s daughter, his cousin, Kristina, dance to “Hound Dog” soon after it was released in 1956, his passion for music was ignited. “It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that,” he said.
Even when David was on the threshold of stardom, Elvis continued to exercise a sway over him to such a degree that, in the face of the King, he would instantly be reduced to the level of fandom. In June 1972, David and his guitarist Mick Ronson took a midday flight from Heathrow to New York and arrived just in time to catch Elvis headlining Madison Square Garden. Or so they hoped. In fact, they arrived there after the show had begun.
As RCA was David’s record label at the time as well as Elvis’s, David had been given the best seats for the show. Which made it even worse that he and Mick arrived while Elvis was in mid-act. He was in the throes of “Proud Mary,” when David, hobbling on Kabuki platform heels, his hair dyed bright red, and in full Ziggy regalia, practically stopped the show. “I could see him thinking: Who the fuck is that? Sit the fuck down. It was really humiliating—but unmissable,” David said years later.
Although the idea was floated that David work with Elvis in a production-writer capacity, which David has said he would have loved, nothing ever came of it. But he still cherishes a note that Elvis sent him, wishing him a good tour—and his imitation of Elvis’s Southern drawl is perfect, mimicry being yet another of David’s manifold talents.
David may have cloaked himself in a mystical, magical, otherworldly image on his rise to stardom, but the reality is that his father came from solid Yorkshire stock, and it is likely that David inherited his financial savvy from him (witness the Bowie Bonds, shares in his back catalogue that David put on the stock market), his shrewdness, and his ability to remain grounded even while studiously projecting the opposite impression.
Born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and brought up in Tadcaster, John was orphaned in early childhood and raised by an aunt. Although he came from a working-class background (his father sold shoes and boots, and his maternal grandfather was foreman of a wool mill), like some hero out of Charles Dickens, John rose in the world after his wealthy aunt sent him to British public (private, in American terms) school, where he was drilled in good manners, thus emerging with the veneer of an English gentleman, to the manner born.
David claimed that his father received the call to work with orphans in a dream, and John did go on to do all he could to help them by taking a job at the children’s charity Dr. Barnardo’s Homes; he began working there in 1935 and continued until his death thirty-four years later.
But saintly as John’s work in his latter years might have been, and true to his son’s propensity for ringing the changes in the most dramatic way possible, he had also lived out a wild, anarchic side in his youth. After inheriting a substantial sum of money when he was only sixteen years old, he had bought a theater club and then a nightclub on Charlotte Street, Lond
on, which was patronized by boxers, wrestlers, and gangsters. Both failed dismally.
Before Peggy came into his life, John had married a cabaret performer known as Hilda, the Viennese Nightingale, but he was unfaithful to her with a nurse who gave birth to his daughter, Annette, whom Hilda, clearly a remarkable woman, agreed to bring up as her own. In fact, when her marriage to John was spiraling downward, Hilda persuaded him to buy a house that Annette could one day inherit. That house was 40 Stansfield Road, and when David was born, Annette would help care for him.
However, in 1956, Annette met and married an Egyptian engineer and moved to Cairo with him, became a Muslim, and coincidentally changed her name to Iman. She last saw David when he was fifteen years old and she’d flown back to London for a visit. “When David walked into the room, it all came flooding back. I threw open my arms to hug him, but he just flinched. I was hurt because I suddenly realized he cut me off in his mind the moment I walked out the front door when he was nine,” Annette said.
After a chance meeting with Peggy Burns in her hometown of Tunbridge Wells, where she was working as a waitress at the Ritz movie theater café, John Haywood Jones fell in love with her. Both strong individuals, they had David in 1947 when they were in their midthirties, and by the time he was eight months old, they decided to marry, thus legitimizing him. They remained married until John’s death, and different as he, a placid and contemplative man, was from Peggy, who managed the unique feat of being alternately tempestuous and cold, he stayed the course with her.