by Wendy Leigh
Stunned, Joshua agreed on the spot, and David said, “Good. Write up the contract,” and walked out.
After a great deal of negotiation, Marlene, too, agreed to play the role of “the Baroness” in Just a Gigolo.
The sole reason why Marlene, then in her late seventies and, since the death of her husband, Rudolf Sieber, living in Paris as a recluse, decided to accept the part of the baroness in Just a Gigolo was the $250,000 fee for just two days’ work. Nonetheless, Dietrich, cannily playing to David’s youthful fan base, declared, “I’m happy David Bowie is in the movie. It’s interesting for me because he wrote the song ‘Kreuzberg.’ ” Kreuzberg is a district of Berlin, the town where Dietrich was born, and with which her name was synonymous.
David’s contract to appear in the movie had been long since signed when he learned that Marlene categorically refused to come to Berlin to shoot the movie with him. Instead, she demanded that her scenes with him be shot in Berlin from his perspective, and that the same scene then be shot from Marlene’s perspective—separately, in Paris, ensuring that the two of them would never appear together in any of the scenes.
Marlene’s refusal to leave her apartment at 12, avenue Montaigne, Paris, close to the Arc de Triomphe and the House of Dior, where she had often purchased the couture clothes she wore with such panache, shouldn’t have been a surprise to Hemmings, or even to David himself. Her iconic glittering beauty now a faded memory, her legendary legs—which had once been insured for one million dollars—swollen, her balance precarious, Marlene, who had dedicated her life to perfecting the legend of Dietrich, was not about to allow her cherished image to be exposed to the harsh light of day.
Moreover, she was also aware that her appearance in Berlin, once the heart of Hitler’s Germany, the country she had abandoned when he came to power, could give rise to violent demonstrations against her, particularly as she had moved to the United States and devoted herself to entertaining the Allied troops during the war. Not only that, but sixteen years before, she had made her last movie, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, starring as the widow of a German general, and a woman virulently opposed to Nazism.
For Marlene it was clear that traveling to Berlin to film Just a Gigolo was out of the question—the filming must come to her, she decided, and her scenes must be filmed in Paris, without her performing with David, face-to-face. Naturally, David had been intent on meeting the legendary Marlene Dietrich, the ultimate symbol of sexual androgyny, a woman whose lovers were as varied as his own (ranging, as they did, from John Wayne to Edith Piaf), and a fellow Capricorn, the sign under which he was proud of being born. When he learned that she would not be filming with him in Berlin, he was gutted.
After filming began, initially unaware of David’s disappointment at not meeting Marlene, David Hemmings was unendingly enthusiastic about his performance. “He had a face that always looked beautiful on camera: he didn’t have any bad angles, which, as it happened, posed a problem on this film,” Hemmings remembered. “We went to a lot of trouble to make him look filthy and down-and-out, buying the scruffiest clothes we could find, but as soon as he put them on, they became an elegant new look.
“We laughed about it a lot—the ‘Gardening Look’ in wellies, baggy old cords, tatty sweaty, and a cloth cap. When I wore it, I looked like a gardener: when Bowie wore it, he looked like the front cover of Vogue,” Hemmings said.
Kim Novak was David’s other costar in the movie, and he would dance a steamy tango with her.
“A splendid woman. She oozes femininity, doesn’t she? Happily married, though,” he said of Kim, and, instead, turned his attentions to Sydne Rome, a diminutive American blond actress he’d first met the year before, in Paris, where they had discussed her appearing in his proposed movie on the Austrian artist Egon Schiele.
Beguiled by Sydne, David invited her to accompany him to the French premiere of The Man Who Fell to Earth, and for a time, they were inseparable. However, Sydne’s blond beauty wasn’t her only attraction for David. Then one of Europe’s rising stars, a rival to Maria Schneider of Last Tango in Paris fame, Sydne also must have appealed to the synthesizer of contacts in David. As a twenty-one-year-old aspiring actress from Sandusky, Ohio, she was discovered by director Roman Polanski, who cast her in his movie What? and promoted her as a latter-day cinematic Cinderella.
What? featured Sydne in a daring seminude scene, and after working with the prestigious Polanski, she topped that by making a movie directed by the distinguished Réne Clément. In short, Sydne was a conduit to Polanski and Clément, if only by association, and thus was irresistible to David.
Nonetheless, he wasn’t about to restrict himself to one woman. At his invitation, Winona Williams flew to Berlin to be with him during the making of Just a Gigolo and remembered, “David and I had dinner with Sydne Rome. She was a little bitch and tried to goad me into some intellectual tête-a-tête, trying to show me up.”
Coco, too, was hostile to Winona. “Although she brought me coffee and orange juice in bed, she also sat at the kitchen table and told me how I wasn’t right for David, and that Bianca Jagger was more suited to him,” Winona said. “But I never took her seriously because she was definitely in love with him and manipulated situations to get women out of his life.”
However, Coco didn’t succeed in banishing Winona from David’s life. As Winona remembered, “I loved David very much, and he prided himself on mentoring me, and left little notes around for me to ponder, like ‘Never handle more power than you are capable of controlling.’ For my birthday, he brought me a limited edition of the occultist Austin Osman Spare’s book The Book of Pleasure (Self Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy and inscribed it with, ‘Winona Happy Birthday 1999 love from me.’ I really did love David very much, but being with him was very draining. He seems to be able to extract energy from people, and whenever I was around him for more than a few days, I would feel so drained. I don’t know how he did it, but I would literally have to leave to refuel my own fire. He managed to touch and take from every fiber of my being,” Winona said, explaining why she left Berlin and ended her relationship with David.
Despite the fact that Marlene wouldn’t shoot any scenes with him, David was still determined to meet her, so he announced to coexecutive producer Joshua Sinclair that when Marlene was scheduled to shoot her scenes in Paris, he intended to fly there, along with a photographer, and pose for photographs with her anyway. Floored for a moment, Joshua rallied, and, aware that David was due to perform at a major rock concert in Australia on April 4, maneuvered it so that the Marlene shoot would be switched to exactly that date.
“Three, four o’clock in the morning, David Hemmings and David Bowie come storming into my hotel in Berlin,” Joshua Sinclair recalled. “They had been drinking and were very angry. I thought they had come to kill me.”
According to Joshua, David Bowie was boiling over with rage and demanded, “Who do you think you are? You think you can just come and tell us when you shoot? You forced the film to be shot on the fourth . . . You made a deal behind our backs.”
Although his plans had been thwarted, David wasn’t about to be vanquished just yet. “Because Bowie, of course, being a pop star, hadn’t given up on anything,” Sinclair said.
Set on having stills taken of him, in his gigolo suit, with Marlene beside him, David flew to Paris to see her. But charming, handsome, and brilliant as David is, and as clever as he has always been at getting his way, Marlene, his fellow Capricorn, had been charming the world and successfully imposing her will wherever and on whomsoever she wanted for far, far longer. Point-blank refusing to pose for any photographs whatsoever, with David or without, Marlene flatly turned him down.
“She said no,” Joshua recalled, “and, according to him, she said it adamantly: ‘I did the movie. I think you’re a great singer, but no.’ I think David Bowie was at the height of his career, or close to it, but he couldn’t get Marlene Dietrich to do some stills with him.”
David’s dreams of working with Marlene, or, at the very least, of being photographed with her, were dashed, but that wasn’t even the worst disappointment of his experience on the film. He had fervently hoped that this role would win him accolades as a serious actor, something that, despite his good reviews for The Man Who Fell to Earth, he hadn’t yet been accorded. But when the movie premiered at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, it was derided as “an unadulterated flop” and an “international misadventure”—the reviews were so dire that David Hemmings went back and reedited the movie.
The new version of Just a Gigolo premiered in Berlin in November 1978. Fortunately for David, he was on tour and not in the movie theater, as the audience fell about laughing at the inanity of the plot and the movie as a whole. Finally, the film was recut, and premiered in London in February 1979, again to terrible reviews. Whereupon David made the immortal comment, “Just a Gigolo was my thirty-two Presley movies rolled into one.”
Returning to music, he recorded Lodger in France. Refusing to be cowed by the failure of Just a Gigolo, he determined to take on another theatrical challenge, one instigated by the new love in his life. . . .
Her name was Oona O’Neill Chaplin, and she was the still-beautiful daughter of legendary American playwright Eugene O’Neill, and the widow of Charlie Chaplin. (At fifty-five, she was twenty-two years David’s senior.) After Charlie Chaplin’s death in 1977, she had remained at their white colonial-style mansion, le Manoir de Ban, Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva, just over three miles from David’s home in Blonay.
Oona’s first meeting with David was facilitated by her youngest son, Eugene, who worked as assistant engineer at Mountain Recording Studios in Montreux, Lake Geneva, where “Heroes” was mixed.
“I was a big fan of David’s and the only fan club I ever joined in my life was his,” Eugene Chaplin remembered, adding, “When I met him, he was very kind and we became friends.”
David met Oona for the first time when Eugene invited him to dinner at le Manoir de Ban and was immediately taken with her. Her pedigree as the daughter of a celebrated American playwright and widow of the one and only Charlie Chaplin added luster to her in David’s eyes.
Growing up in Kennington, which was adjacent to Stockwell, where David first went to school, Charlie Chaplin was not only a fellow South Londoner but a great mime artist, a latter-day Pierrot, a dancer, an actor, a gifted writer, and a great romantic who had composed “Smile,” the classic performer’s anthem.
There was another eerie similarity between David and Chaplin: Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, had been incarcerated in Cane Hill asylum, just as David’s half brother, Terry, now was.
Then there was the fact that Chaplin, notorious for having married a girl who was sixteen to his thirty-five, thus opening himself to charges of statutory rape, was also a sexual outlaw, a pioneer, a sexual revolutionary of a kind, just as David was. A contemporary of Buster Keaton, the silent comedian whom David once wanted to play in a biopic of his life, Charlie Chaplin was a movie immortal, and in dating Oona, his widow, a legendary doe-eyed dark-haired beauty, who had married him when she was eighteen and Chaplin fifty-four, David may well have felt close to Chaplin and his genius, as if he could imbibe some of the latter simply by osmosis.
David had once said that in another life, he might have wanted to be a journalist, and his curiosity, the way in which he fired questions at the more interesting of those whom he encountered, virtually interviewing them, soaking them dry of opinions and information, treating them as intellectual and emotional sources, was not far removed from the modus operandi of the best journalists.
A more negative interpretation, perhaps, could be that David consistently exhibited a slight sociopathic streak whereby human beings were only valued for what they could offer him, teach him, spark off in him, and that other people were merely grist for his creativity. True or not, it was indisputable that in dating Oona Chaplin, David had access to the great love of one of the world’s most legendary geniuses and from her, could glean a great deal about Chaplin.
None of which is to denigrate Oona’s tremendous charm and beauty, as observed by this author during her friendship with one of Oona’s eight children, Vicki, with whom she spent time and stayed with at Oona’s home in Switzerland.
Truman Capote cited Oona as one of his inspirations for the character of Holly Golightly, the heroine of his Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Both Oona’s brother and her half brother committed suicide. No stranger to tragedy, and finely attuned to sensitive, creative geniuses, in many ways Oona was perfect for David. But although they were photographed together in Manhattan by the paparazzi, she persisted in denying that her relationship with him was anything other than purely platonic.
“I’m crazy about David,” she said at the time. “This very charming, very intelligent, very sensitive fellow, who came from the same part of London as Charlie, walked in and wanted to talk. It was as simple as that. I really am very fond of him.”
Nonetheless, although Eugene Chaplin says today that he didn’t know that there was a romance between his mother and David, one of his siblings reportedly suspected that wedding bells were about to chime for the pair, but then joked that it would be more like “a merger than a marriage.”
Oblivious of anyone else’s opinions of their relationship, Oona became so close to David that she felt free enough to throw down a gauntlet: She challenged David, saying that she would accept a part in a movie offered to her by young producer Keith Rothman, provided that David agree to accept the part in a play he’d lately been offered.
In the end, Oona chickened out and declined the role offered to her, but David rose to the challenge anyway and accepted the part of John Merrick in The Elephant Man.
The play had first been produced in London, with illustrious actors such as David Schofield playing the leading role of John Merrick, the tragically grotesque “Elephant Man.” But after seeing Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, director Jack Hofsiss was convinced that David could master the part.
“I thought he was wonderful,” Hofsiss said. “The character he played had an isolation similar to the Elephant Man’s. His perceptions about the part and his interest were all so good that we decided to investigate the possibility of doing it.”
Before he accepted the part, David visited the Royal London Hospital Museum, where he saw plaster casts of Merrick, who had spent his early life in a workhouse, then became a carnival freak, and spent the last four years of his life sheltered by the London Hospital. After visiting the museum, David said, “It made me aware for the first time how grotesque he was—the plaster sculptures are quite stunningly grotesque. And the cap itself is so sad, with the mask down the front. It must have been a terrible burden.”
David joined the Elephant Man company in San Francisco and made his debut at the end of July in Denver, after only two and a half weeks of rehearsal. Before his first performance, he confided to rock journalist Lisa Robinson, who had met him when he first came to America: “It’s the most terrifying position I’ve ever put myself in, ever. I’ve had no legitimate theater training whatsoever. I’ve just had a mime thing, which is very different. I went in with a very naïve conception of how one acts.”
He had seen the play before and was aware of the rigors of the part, so he exercised preshow and postshow, and also was treated by a chiropractor at the end of every performance. After he opened in Denver, his reviews were uniformly positive, with one critic raving, “Bowie seems to have been sculpted to play the role.”
The next stop was Chicago, where he also garnered superlative reviews for his performance. During his run there, rather unwillingly, he agreed with RCA that two British newspapers could send a reporter to interview him about his role in the play. So Chris Charlesworth, then RCA press officer, flew out with a reporter from the London Sunday Times and another from New Musical Express, on the condition, set down by David’s handlers, that each one of them would be granted just an hour of his time.
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p; “They had to fly all the way from London to Chicago and back, just to spend one hour with David, and no more, and the New Musical Express man was appalled,” Charlesworth remembered. “So I took him aside and said to him, ‘Look, it’s up to you. If you are interesting, if you ask the right questions, you might persuade David to overrule his minders and give you more time.’
“Fortunately, the New Musical Express man was an intelligent bloke. He and David got on so well that David gave him two hours that day, and an hour and a half the next. David’s minders were angry about this because they had to change his schedule, but I told them it wasn’t my fault, it was David’s. He had decided he was the boss.
“As a result of David giving the New Musical Express man three and a half hours instead of one in which to interview him, NME gave him six pages and the cover, and the bosses were pleased. David knew better than his minders what would help promote his career,” Charlesworth said.
After his interview in Chicago with New Musical Express’s Angus MacKinnon, David opened on Broadway as the Elephant Man. And although Oona Chaplin had characterized her relationship with David as being “strange,” she praised his “quiet, serious side,” and was there in the audience at the Broadway opening of The Elephant Man. She said afterward, “He was breathtakingly good at expressing physical agony.” David and Oona became so close that during his Broadway run, she went so far as to buy an apartment in Manhattan, and over the next three months, she and David spent most of their time together.
“They are an unlikely pair, but David Bowie and Oona Chaplin are in love,” one source close to them claimed, while another said, “Age doesn’t seem to matter to them. If you didn’t know them you would think they were truly an odd couple. But underneath, they are really perfect for each other.”