Bowie

by Wendy Leigh

  David was intent on absorbing all of Ken’s advice, and hour after hour assiduously eavesdropped on Ken’s telephone calls as Pitt employed all his public relations skills in promoting his charge to the press. In fact, David was so set on grasping every aspect of the PR business that Ken sometimes found him riffling through the letters on his desk, in quest of further knowledge of PR and marketing. By studying a seasoned publicist like Ken Pitt so intently, David was able to build on what he had already learned from his father about public relations. Consequently, when success finally hit, David would become renowned amongst the press for being the most intelligent, polite, and interesting rock star they’d ever interviewed.

  Aware that David’s talents were multidimensional, Ken threw himself into finding him work in a variety of creative fields and arranged for him to audition as host of ITV’s children’s program Play School, and for the Amsterdam run of the English touring company of the rock musical Hair. But as much as he wanted to succeed, David failed to get either part.

  Later on, out of financial necessity, in June 1968, he took a part-time job at Legastat, a photocopy shop near London’s High Court, which was primarily patronized by legal professionals working nearby. There, according to owner John Eddowes, David was “a nice, studious guy. We all liked him.”

  Along the way, in January 1969, he also appeared singing in a thirty-second TV commercial for LUV ice cream, which was shot by Ridley Scott.

  Meanwhile, Ken Pitt never lost faith in him. “I’m going to make him a star,” he announced to London booking agent Harry Dawson, who had said to his face that David would never get anywhere. But if Ken Pitt was David’s biggest champion, he was also his Boswell, immortalizing their year of living together with a combination of perception and adoration, afterward writing of David, “He had a way of sitting in a chair and looking at you with a certain intensity. He managed to look at you as though his eyes were slightly closed, but then you realized that they were in fact wide open and you got the impression that, as you were talking to him, he was analyzing and dissecting every word you said and forming an opinion in his mind.”

  During his time living with Ken, perhaps prompted by his hero worship of Anthony Newley, who performed mime in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off so successfully, he began to study mime with former stripper, comic, dancer, and mime artist Lindsay Kemp—with whom, unbeknownst to Ken, he also conducted an affair.

  In Lindsay Kemp, David had found a kindred spirit.

  “I like to do most everything fully. I drink until I’m drunk. I eat until I’m full, frequently until I’m sick. I don’t fancy people, I fall in love with them,” Lindsay once proclaimed.

  Lindsay had perfected a performance that successfully combined drag with mime and dance. After Pitt sent Kemp a copy of David’s single, from his album, David Bowie, entitled “When I Live My Dream,” Lindsay took to playing it before his show, then on at the Little Theatre Club, off St. Martin’s Lane in London. He invited David to come and see the show. Apart from being riveted by Lindsay’s artistry, David, who was nine years Lindsay’s junior, was highly flattered that Lindsay had introduced the show by playing his song. Naturally, one thing led to another, and soon David was studying dance and mime with Lindsay, and sharing his bed, as well.

  After David began his affair with Lindsay, which he kept secret from Ken Pitt, he also launched on a simultaneous affair with Lindsay’s costume and set designer, Natasha Korniloff. And then there was also Lesley Duncan, who introduced him to the music of Jacques Brel and also became his lover.

  Scott Walker had been his predecessor in Lesley’s life, and long afterward, David cracked, “I went out with a girl who used to go out with Scott Walker and she preferred him to me. I had to listen to all his songs night after night. She wouldn’t play my music.”

  Through all of David’s romantic escapades, Ken Pitt became accustomed to what he termed “David’s walkabouts,” the times when he disappeared and didn’t offer up any explanations designed to justify his whereabouts. But the fact that David was simultaneously juggling male and female lovers couldn’t have been a complete secret to Pitt, who exhibited a well-developed sense of irony when he arranged for David to audition for director John Schlesinger, then casting Sunday, Bloody Sunday. The part? That of Bob Elkin, the handsome bisexual man having concurrent affairs with the character played by Peter Finch and the one played by the young and beautiful Glenda Jackson (whom David would go on to eerily resemble in the video for “Life on Mars?”) and with Peter Finch.

  Yet perfect as David might have been for the role, and however uncannily closely the plot of the film mirrored his current sexual relationships and however much the character of Bob Elkin could easily have been based on him, he failed to get the part; Murray Head played it instead. And after Decca refused to renew David’s record contract, news of which reportedly caused him to break down and cry, in despair, he called Stuart Lyons, who ran the Hampstead Country Club, and asked him if he could do a gig there.

  “David used to call me all the time,” said Stuart, echoing one of the complaints of music writer Penny Valentine, who reviewed his work with passion but became exasperated when he kept calling her, pushing her to write about him.

  “He was very persistent, and more pushy than most artists,” Stuart remembered. “But I did book him at The Country Club.”

  Fortunately, David’s father’s contacts also came in handy once more, again in the shape of Leslie Thomas, whose novel The Virgin Soldiers was being made into a film at Twickenham Film Studios, and who arranged for David to be cast as an extra in the tiny nonspeaking role of one of the “virgin” soldiers.

  “Typecast again,” David cracked at the time.

  Playing a larger part in the movie, Scottish actor Alex Norton hung out with David during filming. “We got on very well . . . we both played guitar and had little jam sessions together. David introduced me to the songs of Jacques Brel. He sang them to me and I was amazed,” Alex remembered.

  With his brief movie acting stint behind him, David continued his mime classes, and his relationship with Lindsay, who commented on his progress: “He wasn’t a very good mover, but he was equipped with the essential thing: a desire to move. And I taught him to exteriorize, to reveal his soul. And he had all this inside him, anyway.”

  Producer and musician Tony Visconti, who has played a major part in David’s career, right up through today, started working with him around this time and remembered seeing David “go to a mirror just to check a head angle, or he would brush his hair back in a particular way. At the time I thought he was just incredibly vain; later I realized that he was always working on himself, constantly honing his stage persona.”

  With Lindsay and Jack Birkett, in December 1967, David appeared in the play Pierrot in Turquoise, for which Natasha designed the set and the costumes. Besotted by David, she classified him as “a wonderful lover,” and, to top that, really seemed to understand him.

  “He’s not an acquisitive person at all. He doesn’t care for possessions very much,” she said.

  At the same time, while Natasha clearly got close enough to David to understand him perfectly, Lindsay still brandished a torch for him, as well, and swooned that he was “an angel.”

  David was playing fast and loose with his assorted lovers by resorting to the most rudimentary of schoolboy tricks. As Lindsay (who later allowed that “David had an enormous sexual appetite,”) remembered, “Frequently there were notes from his mother to say he had earache or something, but later on I realized of course that those notes had been faked.”

  It was only matter of a time before David’s entire house of amorous cards collapsed completely. On one night while David, Natasha, and Lindsay were on tour together in Whitehaven, as Lindsay recently remembered, “I heard noises through the wall: It was David and Natasha, who hadn’t known that I was seeing David. After that, he couldn’t go to Natasha’s bed and he certainly couldn’t go to mine, so he spent three nights sleeping
in a chair, the tortured martyr.”

  In the heat of the moment, Natasha took an overdose of aspirin, and Lindsay, even more dramatically, cut his wrists. Both of them survived, but neither of them forgave David, at least not at the time.

  But perhaps if they had read one of his first interviews, the one he gave to Barbara Marilyn Deane of The Chelsea News in which he said, flatly, “I do not believe in love in its possessive form,” they might have understood his attitude toward love, sex, and relationships.

  Fortunately, in the near future, he would meet the one person in the universe who would understand and share those attitudes completely.

  FIVE

  MODERN LOVE

  Although David’s betrayal of both Natasha and Lindsay had tarnished his relationship with them, albeit temporarily, he still carried on seeing them—in particular, Lindsay, who had awakened him to the world of Kabuki, to Jean Genet, and even the music hall. In return, David introduced him to Buddhism, which he was then exploring. Still, no matter how cavalier David’s behavior to him had been, Lindsay still loved him. Years later he would continue to revel in the fact that those who learned of their affair would be lost in wonder: He imagined them asking themselves, “Can this bald-headed old queen have been Bowie’s boyfriend?” he said.

  As David’s work with Lindsay’s mime group wound down, Ken Pitt was still struggling manfully to promote David’s career and get him bookings, but he was increasingly finding that David was defying him by ignoring his professional advice and disappearing for days on end. Finally, David moved out of Ken’s apartment, ostensibly returning to live with his parents again in Plaistow Grove.

  The truth, though, was that David had fallen hard for a woman, a fragile, beautiful English rose named Hermione Farthingale. They met for the first time at one of Lindsay’s dance classes in London’s Covent Garden, and in the spring of 1968, they both danced in The Pistol Shot, a BBC TV play. So it was that, for the first time in his life, David was in love in a conventional way, with a relatively conventional woman, one who came from a prosperous middle-class family, a cut above his own.

  Away from performing, David and Hermione, a trained classical ballet dancer, swiftly became close, despite the fact that her father, an attorney, didn’t particularly approve of David. Her father’s approval, however, didn’t matter much to Hermione.

  “We were twin souls, very alike. I was fascinated by him, this fey, elfin creature,” she said.

  For a while, Ken didn’t learn about the advent of Hermione in David’s life. “David used to tell Ken he was going to go to Hampstead Heath to watch for flying saucers and UFOs, when he was actually going to see Hermione,” Michael Armstrong said.

  David managed to sustain his deception for a while, but soon it became clear to him that he needed to escape from Ken’s jealous possessiveness of him. Consequently, he moved into the house that Hermione shared with other aspiring artists at 22 Clareville Grove, in London’s Kensington district. He was now twenty-one, and Hermione nineteen. They were both beautiful, and Hermione, in her natural incarnation, and David in his freshly acquired current one, were idealistic and determined to live a bohemian lifestyle together.

  For a few months, their love and life together appeared to be idyllic. So much a product of the Summer of Love, of hippie ideals, their joint enterprise, Feathers (a multimedia group comprised of David, Hermione, and John Hutchinson, singing the songs of Jacques Brel and of David doing mime), and their youth itself attracted the attention of the media. They were selected as two of the subjects for a prestigious feature for the Times titled “The Restless Generation,” written by Sheila More and published on December 11, 1968.

  Ironically, none other than Mick Jagger was also featured in the same article as typifying his generation, along with his then girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, and Tony Visconti’s future wife Mary Hopkin, who had just hit the charts with her wistful “Those Were the Days.”

  While Mick railed against convention and the older generation (“When you grow up, you become a thinking person, you can’t stay a child, and some parents just can’t take that.”), David came off as more nihilistic: “We feel our parents’ generation has lost control, given up, they’re scared of the future,” he said, adding, “I feel we’re going to make an even greater mess of it. There can only be disaster ahead.”

  His relationship with Hermione would endure for more than a year. Then, after she came back from Norway, where she was filming the small part of a dancer in Song of Norway, she announced to David that she had fallen in love with one of the dancers on the movie and went on to end her relationship with him. His heart was broken, and even in 2000, he still had her letters. Devastated by this once-in-a-lifetime romantic rejection—his first and last—he would turn to Dana Gillespie for comfort, turning up at her South Kensington cottage in floods of tears.

  Despite his heartache over losing Hermione, professionally he knew he had no choice but to move on. By the next year, he was running the Beckenham Arts Lab and trumpeting it in suitably politically correct terms. “I run an arts lab, which is my chief occupation,” he declared to Melody Maker. “I think it’s the best in the country. The people who come are completely pacifist . . . we started our lab a few months ago with poets and artists who just came along.”

  Steve Dube was a young reporter when he covered David and the Arts Lab. “I remember his eyes in particular because they were a different color. He was wearing bell-bottom trousers and a flowery shirt and looked like a hippie,” Steve said. “I remember thinking that I liked him. He was a nice guy and was straight with me. Some people bend over backwards to create a good impression on a journalist. I didn’t think that David was trying to create a favorable impression. He wasn’t trying to sell himself; he was interested in what he was doing and in the people he was doing it with. I liked that.”

  However, David was still looking for work, either in the theater or in movies, and he got a part in a live TV two-character play, My Country ’Tis of Thee, with Lesley Joseph, then a student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

  “We were playing two hippies who were at a police station, and I can’t remember much more about the play. David was a typical working actor,” Lesley said. “I remember that he invited me to the Arts Lab, but I didn’t go.”

  By now David was living in Beckenham with a new girlfriend, journalist Mary Finnigan, a divorcée with two children, a free spirit who came from a middle-class background but who also had a subversive streak that had led her to experiment with drugs and which ended with her serving a short time in London’s Holloway Prison for women.

  Radical and liberated, Mary fell hard for David, and soon he was singing in a local folk club and taking hash with her in his spare time. However, little though Mary knew it, true to form, David was not faithful to her. Apart from still dallying with Ken Pitt, who continued to be his manager, once a week, David would also spend the night in London with thirty-three-year-old Chinese-American A&R man Calvin Mark Lee, a flamboyant, flirty, effeminate character from San Francisco who wore a glittering red love jewel on his forehead and was a doctor of pharmaceutical chemistry.

  Looking back at his affair with David, Lee often questioned whether or not David’s interest in him had been prompted by the fact that he was the influential assistant head of record label Mercury’s European office. Calvin and David first met in 1967, after Calvin sent David fan letters, care of Ken Pitt, some of which were laced with passionate love declarations. David was not immune to Calvin’s sentiments and was flattered by the strong emotions he had aroused in someone who had never even met him.

  Their affair, which began during David’s relationship with Hermione, and continued after he had replaced her with Mary, was beneficial to David, not just because of Calvin’s record company role, but also because Calvin’s flamboyant image had made its mark among London’s glitterati and he was renowned as one of the best networkers around town—thus he was in a prime position to introduce Dav
id to powerful and important people.

  According to informed observers, Calvin was madly in love with David and wanted a deeper relationship with him than the casual fling that David had in mind. By now, David was an accomplished sexual juggler, an emotional tightrope walker, living out a duplicitous existence. What with Ken Pitt’s continuing passion for him, Hermione, then Mary, and now Calvin, as well, the pressure on David escalated and finally took its toll on him in the form of debilitating migraine headaches. Yet despite all the convoluted problems he was juggling in his personal life, his creativity remained untarnished, and he continued to be prolific in writing songs.

  One night, he called Dana Gillespie and asked if he could come over and sing her his latest song. Naturally, she agreed, and, arriving at her South Kensington cottage with his guitar, he proceeded to strum to the words “Ground control to Major Tom.” After Dana expressed her approval of “Space Oddity,” David telephoned Shirley Wilson, a Bromley girl who had started his fledgling fan club, and played her the song, and she liked it as well. Then David went over to Ken Pitt’s, and, on his twelve-string guitar, played the song for him. And, love-struck or not, Pitt recognized a hit when he heard one, and proceeded to finance “Space Oddity” every step of the way.

  Calvin Mark Lee, of course, was on hand, pushing for David, doing all he could to get the song released on Mercury. However, his boss, Lou Reizner, remained unconvinced of David’s talent and of the potential of “Space Oddity.” In truth, his indifference to David and his work was not rooted in professional grounds but in the fact that David had stolen his girlfriend. Her name was Angela Mary Barnett.

  A whirlwind of manic energy, with a view of herself so inflated that her bumptiousness knew no bounds, at nineteen, Angie, as she always called herself, was highly strung, creative, kindhearted, and the daughter of an American colonel, who’d fought the Japanese in World War II but was now running a mill for a mining company in Cyprus, and his wife, Helen.