Bowie

by Wendy Leigh

  Though that project didn’t come to fruition for Eno, his Discreet Music album of ambient music made a great impression on David. He and Eno had always experienced a strange brand of synchronicity. During David’s Ziggy Stardust days, Eno had also been an adherent of glam rock and had dressed accordingly. But then, like David, also influenced by Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, he decided to look to Berlin to reinvent himself.

  Before recording Low at Château d’Hérouville, David and Brian spent hours brainstorming together. Iggy was also around, and would sing on one of the album’s tracks, “What in the World.” The lines were drawn clearly between David’s work and Eno’s, in that David would sing the vocals on the album and Eno would sing backup on some tracks, and direct and compose most of the second side of the album.

  Zowie was now primarily living with David in Berlin and going to school there. He had made friends with the other children, and seemed to be happy. David did his best as a father, but often was inadequate in communicating with him, and on those occasions, according to an eyewitness, they would sit together in awkward silence. The tension escalated when Angie arrived in Berlin for a visit and, in the heat of the moment, she and David had sex for the first time in a long time. But if Angie believed that this heralded a reconciliation, she was wrong. And, as always, Coco proved to be a stumbling block.

  Over and over, Angie demanded that David fire Coco, cut her out of his life, but he refused—and with a combination of naïveté and incredulity insisted, “Angie, how can you ask that? You know how much I rely on her. She’s part of the organization. She knows everything about my business. Who else could run it the way she could?”

  Angie volunteered that she could, but David ignored her. When he discovered that Coco had fled the apartment, where she had her own room, he became extremely concerned and searched Berlin for her, desperate. However, having witnessed the level of his concern for Coco, Angie knew she had been vanquished.

  Before she left Berlin, Angie executed one last dramatic move: She threw all of Coco’s things out of the window, then left the apartment forever.

  By now, eight years after Angie and David gotten married, she had a new boyfriend, Keeth Paul, sound engineer for pop group the Heartbreakers, who was living with her in Switzerland, where she was funded by the $35,000 annual allowance David was paying her, in addition to her rent, travel and almost all her other expenses, which he paid.

  London Sunday Mirror journalist Tony Robinson traveled to Switzerland, where Angie and Keeth were staying in a nine-bedroom rented chalet near David’s home in Blonay. Just back from a trip to America, Angie had arranged for six-year-old Zowie to spend time with David in Berlin, but was now hell-bent on getting full-time custody of him.

  When Robinson arrived at the chalet, he found Angie in a dreadful state. “She was nearly senseless,” he recalled. “A few hours later, at about 4 A.M.., she got out of bed and locked herself in one of the chalet’s nine bathrooms, and took sleeping tablets and tranquillizers.

  “Then, before they took effect, she went on the rampage around the house, breaking ornaments and glassware—particularly in the room used by Zowie’s Scots nanny.”

  After Keeth Paul tried to calm her down, “she hit him a crippling blow on the kneecap with a heavy rolling pin. In the kitchen she picked up a steel carving knife and tried to summon the courage to fall on it,” Robinson said.

  Tony and Keeth managed to coax her into getting some sleep, but the following morning, Angie “got out of bed, smashed the glass shade of a standard lamp outside her bedroom, and threw herself down stairs to the basement.

  “We found her in a crumpled heap with her face swollen and covered in blood,” Robinson said.

  “I just couldn’t take anymore . . . I wanted to top myself . . . I thought, What the hell,” Angie said afterward.

  Soon after, David asked Angie for a divorce, and she agreed, granting him custody of Zowie, claiming that she knew she would not have been awarded custody, as David had Polaroids of her having sex with a woman. As a settlement, David paid her $750,000 in 1980, while she agreed to a ten-year gag order forbidding her to talk to the media about him and their marriage. But apart from a brief meeting with David in Lausanne, where he signed their divorce papers, she never saw him again.

  Afterward, Angie would claim that she had wanted to put up a fight and claim custody of Zowie, but that attorneys dissuaded her. “David had money. Zowie was with him. I thought Zowie was better off with David than with me, initially,” was one of her rationales.

  The union of Angie and David Bowie, once mirror images of each other—both young and ambitious, androgynous and anarchic, each completely in tune with the other—had come to an end with a bang, followed by a lifetime of whimpers from Angie. Only a year after accepting David’s $750,000 and agreeing not to talk to the press about him, Angie promptly broke the gag order and published her first autobiography, Free Spirit, written with show business journalist Don Short, who flew to Los Angeles and interviewed her in depth about her life and about David.

  “She was bitter, and felt that she had been short-changed and that what she had done for him professionally hadn’t been recognized; but she still said that she admired him,” Short said.

  And even at the end of her second memoir, Backstage Passes, Angie looked back at her life with David with a degree of positivity and paid him this tribute: “Regardless of his performance with me, David did do a wonderful job of broadcasting sexual freedom and personal liberation. He shone his light into a lot of dark places in people and helped them see themselves, and maybe love themselves a little better.”

  David, however, was not so sanguine about Angie. Describing “the maternal side” of Zowie’s life as tragic, he went on to crack of her, “It was like living with a blow-torch,” and, “She has as much insight into the human condition as a walnut and a self-interest that would make Narcissus green with envy.”

  In Berlin, with Coco by his side, David did his utmost to build a home for Zowie, and did all he could to make up for the lost years. By the time Zowie was ten, David had, for the most part, kicked drink and drugs and had morphed into a relatively conventional father, taking Zowie to the movies, and on tour with him, where the boy was watched over by the roadies when David was performing.

  Finally, in an attempt, perhaps, to restore some routine to Zowie’s life, David went so far as to send Zowie (who went on to change his name to Joey when he was twelve, simply because he wanted to be known by a regular name at last), to the spartan Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun, which Prince Charles had attended.

  And while Joey, who quickly revised his nickname to Joe, submitted to the harsh regime at Gordonstoun, he wasn’t particularly happy there, and as an adult described himself as “a sensitive child,” who needed “a few more hugs.”

  For though Angie did telephone him repeatedly at Gordonstoun, she was off on her own adventures and wasn’t around to give her son love and tenderness. In July 1980, with her then lover, punk musician Andrew Lipka, who performed under the name Drew Blood, she had a daughter, Stacia. After Angie’s father helped wean her off drugs, he and her mother both died in 1983, leaving Angie bereft and living in reduced circumstances in Greenwich Village. Joe did visit her there when he was thirteen years old, but after he commented on how she was living, she rounded on him and yelled that he was “bourgeois.”

  From that time on, Angie’s letters to Joe at Gordonstoun (where he would remain for five years) remained unopened, and Joe never saw Angie again. “She’s a woman who didn’t have a very positive effect on my upbringing, so I think it was the right move,” Zowie, now calling himself Duncan, asserted to Caroline Graham of the Mail on Sunday in August 2009.

  For the past twenty years, Angie Bowie has been living with electrical engineer Michael Gassett, who is nearly two decades her junior.

  In contrast to Angie’s track record as a parent, from the time when David assumed full custody of Joe, he transformed himself into a c
ommitted and strict father, a dramatic change—but then, change has always been the essence of David Bowie.

  Ironically, in keeping with a natural fatherly desire to protect his son from the pitfalls he’d faced along the way in the ultimate expression of “do as I say, not as I do,” David took Joey to see Johnny Rotten, then on tour in Switzerland—and afterward, Joe dyed his hair alternately silver, red, and blue. When David saw him, he erupted with, “Joey, you don’t think I’m going to go out with you looking like—”

  Whereupon Joe just looked at David and said, “Dad. . . .”

  “And it suddenly hit me,” David confessed, adding, “It was momentarily hard to deal with.”

  In 1993, during an interview in Arena with Tony Parsons, David looked back at his relationship with his son and confessed, “I didn’t give him enough time until 1975. Then I took over from that point as father and parent. Up until that point his nanny had been his mother. His real mother was in and out of his life. And it was a pretty rotten childhood, I think. Probably one of the most major regrets of my life is that I didn’t spend enough time with him when he was really young.”

  In contrast, Joe—who began going by Duncan when he was eighteen years old—seems to bear no resentment toward David for his early neglect of him. Although he claims to have been grumpy, confused, and upset in his twenties, after being asked to leave Gordonstoun at the age of eighteen because he fell asleep in an examination, he studied philosophy, then went to the London Film School and worked his way up to becoming a director, winning multiple awards for his film, Moon.

  Supportive of David and full of love for him, Duncan doesn’t harbor a shred of bitterness towards his father for the past, “ ’He’s just a wonderful guy and father and I think he understands that I’m a creative person in my own right. He gave me the time and the support to find my feet and the confidence to do what I do,” he said.

  On September 16, 1977, David suffered the end of one of his oldest relationships when Marc Bolan was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-nine. A month earlier, David had performed on Marc’s TV show, and he was devastated by his friend’s untimely death. At his funeral, he sat behind Dana Gillespie and cried.

  Marc Bolan died just before his son Rolan’s birthday. And because Marc wasn’t married to Rolan’s mother, the boy was left in dire circumstances. David, who was Marc’s godfather, paid for his education and other expenses.

  “David’s generosity helped my mother and me to survive,” Rolan Bolan said. “It wasn’t just the financial help, but the time and kindness. He kept in regular touch by phone, and his first and last words every time were: ‘Don’t hesitate to tell me if there is anything I can do.’ He’d shrug off our thanks, saying it was the least he could do for the family of a good friend.”

  In September 1977, David managed to pry himself away from Berlin and fly to London, where he cut two of the most successful Christmas duets ever recorded—“The Little Drummer Boy” and “Peace on Earth” with Bing Crosby. Bing was in London at the time, touring, and David—along with Twiggy—guested on Bing’s Christmas special, which aired on November 30, 1977. The gig was a radical departure for David, who, when he arrived at the studio, announced that he hated “The Little Drummer Boy,” and asked if he could sing something else—hence he also sang “Peace on Earth” on the special.

  David was thirty years old to Bing’s seventy-three, and fans and critics alike were surprised that David had appeared on the show. Somewhat ingeniously, he explained his duet with Crosby away by saying that he’d decided to appear in the show “only because my mum liked him.” Given that he and Peggy had been at loggerheads for years, his explanation sounds hollow, to say the least. Living in the Beckenham apartment that David had purchased for her, with only his gold records and awards to remind her of his fame and fortune, Peggy was bitter and alone. Guilty that she had allowed her son Terry to be committed to a state asylum, Cane Hill, in nearby Coulsden after the family curse of schizophrenia had struck him, Peggy left much of his care to her younger sister, Pat. As for David, Peggy was heard to snap, “He owes me,” and she accepted his monthly allowance without a great deal of gratitude.

  Back in Berlin, David was rattled when an art dealer approached him and, clearly assuming that he was a Hitler fan, tried to sell him a bust of Hitler. David was outraged, and even more so when, one day, walking past the Wall in West Berlin, he came upon graffiti depicting his name entwined with a swastika. Whether or not he had become associated with Hitler because of the notorious photograph of him giving the Hitler salute, or because he had purchased Goebbels’s desk and had mentioned that he wanted to make a biopic of Goebbels’s life, is not on record. But as famous as he was, and always would be, it remained virtually impossible for him to erase the ripple effect of the negative press coverage of his salute from the Mercedes.

  Berlin’s history, past and present, continued to play on his mind. And on the anniversary of the Wall’s erection, he happened to be at a punk club, where a birthday cake replica of the Wall was on display. “And as midnight struck, all these punks just started lunging into the cake, rooting pieces out of it. I wished I had a camera. I had never seen anything like it,” he said afterward.

  David had recorded “Heroes” at Hansa Studio, just five hundred yards from the Wall, in full view of armed guards and barbed wire. Afterwards, Tony Visconti, who produced the track, joked, “The band played it with so much energy, I think they [the band] wanted to go home, actually.”

  But while David and Eno’s rousing anthem “Heroes” was purported to be about two lovers separated from one another because of the Berlin Wall, the truth happened to be that David chanced to see Visconti and singer Antonia Maass walking hand in hand in the shadow of the Wall. When Tony and Antonia got back to the studio in the midst of recording, David and Coco told them that they had seen them walking by the Wall, and, inspired by that vision, then and there, David sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Heroes.”

  “I am totally a creature of environment,” he once said. “My albums are expressions of, reflections of, that environment. ‘Heroes’ certainly is, and you have to understand that to understand the album and the music at all.”

  FIFTEEN

  JUST A GIGOLO

  On the evening of July 1, 1978, in the Royal Box of London’s Earls Court auditorium, Peggy Jones was thumbing through the program for David’s Isolar II world tour when the door of the private box opened, and there was David.

  He’d stayed away from her for so long, had been so out of touch that, for a moment, the voluble Peggy was tongue-tied.

  “You didn’t have to come up here to see me,” she said, finally.

  “You’re my mum,” he said, without any hesitation.

  That he had invited her to the show was naturally a given, but that he had taken the trouble to greet her himself was quite another story. He had proffered his mother an olive branch from afar. Now, however, he had upped the ante by making the effort to come to see her face-to-face, taking a tentative first step toward the kind of acceptance that only age and experience seem to draw out of families. The reunion, however, did not herald a new closeness between David and Peggy, but it was a start.

  British TV personality Janet Street-Porter was on hand at Earls Court that night to interview David. He had invited her because he was impressed by her brassy burgundy hair. Beforehand, he stipulated that the interview be filmed while they walked from his dressing room to the stage, so that the screaming fans would be seen in the background.

  “Bowie was charming, softly spoken, and completely captivating, although he said absolutely nothing of note,” Street-Porter said years later, highlighting the fact that despite the intervening years, David, the son of public relations maven John Jones, still remained the boy who had studied the craft of PR at Ken Pitt’s feet. With his slick, polished British manners, and perhaps partly aping the tactics of Dr. Goebbels, whose desk he owned, David effortlessly retained every iota of control possible o
ver his own image.

  Still living in Berlin and completely out of touch with London life, David continued to cleave to his new existence in Germany.

  “I ended up in Berlin. It makes it a very good place for someone like me to live, because I can be incredibly anonymous. They don’t seem particularly joyful about seeing a famous face,” he said.

  He still retained his Swiss home outside Geneva, and it was there that actor-turned-director of Blow-Up, David Hemmings, went to visit him in the hopes of persuading him to play the part of a young, jaded Prussian officer who comes back to Berlin after the First World War, finds himself alienated from everything around him, and, in despair, resorts to becoming a gigolo, working for a sinister baroness, who the producers hoped would be played by none other than Marlene Dietrich, one of David’s idols, a cabaret star par excellence, a Hollywood siren and, perhaps equally important, a woman who had pioneered both bisexuality and open marriage in her own private life.

  When Hemmings flew to Switzerland to meet with David, Hemmings was instantly captivated by him. As he wrote in his autobiography, “He was, as I had expected, hugely stimulating to deal with—clever, funny, original, and with a very special natural elegance. . . . Bowie, thank God, was fascinated by the character he had to play. He was anxious to delve into the persona of the gigolo, the male heterosexual hooker—a type he had always found somewhat inscrutable and difficult to get to know. And the role allowed him to show the sensual side of his nature, which hadn’t been possible in his last film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, where his character didn’t have any genitals!”

  Relatively charmed by Hemmings—but even more so by the fact that, as he later said, “Marlene was dangled in front of me”—David decided to negotiate his own contract. But when he arrived at Hemmings’s office, according to coexecutive producer Joshua Sinclair, who told the story to Charlotte Chandler for her biography of Marlene, David slammed his hand on the table and declared that he wanted $250,000 to play the part, plus 5 percent of the French box office earnings.