by Wendy Leigh
Perfect or not, David was also wooing other women apart from Oona and turned his attention to socialite and former Warhol star Belgian-born Monique van Vooren, who had, years before, dated none other than Elvis, with whom he had been fascinated since childhood, and with whom he shared a January 8 birthday. Just as dating Oona Chaplin had brought David close to Charlie Chaplin, by association, dating Monique would have the same effect vis-à-vis Elvis.
Initially, Monique had been his escort to the Manhattan premiere of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in November 1977. Three years later, when David was in Manhattan rehearsing for The Elephant Man, a friend of Monique’s invited her to a party where he was also a guest.
“David wanted to take me out, but I was interested in someone else at the time,” Monique recalled. “But he still came over to my house on Sixty-Sixth Street for dinner, and he learned his lines for the play with me and rehearsed the various scenes with me, as well.
“I thought he had great style, but it wasn’t a romance, although he wanted it to be. He kept calling me, kept sending me little gifts—a blue-and-white floral silk scarf, a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran—and sent me flowers, as well.
“Someone calls you, invites you out, sends you gifts, invites you here and there, and then you know he is interested in you, but that was that. We kissed, and it was marvelous. But I was committed elsewhere and couldn’t take it further. David was a bit surprised when I turned him down, because I suppose everyone fell for him. But I didn’t,” Monique said.
During The Elephant Man’s Broadway run, David played to packed houses every night, and although he was exhausted after every performance, he said, “I’m enjoying it thoroughly. I never believed that old axiom about being able to find a different part of a character playing it every night, but it turns out that it’s quite true. With this play, the terrifying discipline is the entire thing. There isn’t any room for outward physical spontaneity. It’s blocked all the way through: very different from rock and roll.”
Audiences from Elizabeth Taylor to Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Christopher Isherwood were all won over by David’s bravura performance. John Lennon, too, had hoped to see the play with David in it, but that was not to be. David was immeasurably shocked by Lennon’s December 8, 1980, assassination, and his immediate reaction was recorded by May Pang, who relayed it to Paul Trynka, author of Starman.
According to May, David, like her, experienced great difficulty in accepting John’s assassination. She remembered him screaming, “What the hell, what the fuck is going on with this world!” not just once, but many, many times.
After John’s murder, David increased his own security, and, in a quirkier coincidence, he rekindled his relationship with his mother once more. After flying her to America, he invited Peggy to The Elephant Man, where he personally introduced her to every single member of the cast. Afterward he and Zowie had dinner with her. But although Peggy’s stay in Manhattan heralded a more positive understanding between her and David, their relationship would never be particularly warm or close. For while there were those who had speculated that after the murder of John, David had reignited his relationship with his mother primarily because he was worried about who would care for Zowie, if David, like John, died before his time, they probably had no idea about exactly what kind of mother Peggy had been to David as a child. Nor did they know that even though he had now finally brought her back into his life, he would still never be able to erase the past and forget.
Toward the end of the year, still rattled to the core by John Lennon’s murder, David retreated to Switzerland, where he spent Christmas with Oona Chaplin and her children, the eldest of whom, actress Geraldine, raved of him, “He’s simply charming.”
Meanwhile, Oona continued to deny that she was having a relationship with him. “He sometimes comes over for a meal. He’s very nice, sweet, intelligent, and talented. I find him stimulating and fun. But there is no romance at all. There have even been reports that I may marry him. It is absolutely not true, though my children were very amused by the idea,” she said.
While he was appearing in The Elephant Man, David also took time to play himself in the German movie Christiane F., and his sequences were shot at Manhattan’s Hurrah club. His willingness to make a cameo in the movie was motivated by an extremely personal reason: Christiane F. was based on the 1979 book Christiane F.: Autobiography of a Girl of the Streets and a Heroin Addict, the story of a teenage heroin addict. Apart from being an exposé of Berlin’s drug culture during the seventies, the book was based on the real-life Christiane F.’s flirtation with heroin, which, shockingly, first began when she attended a Bowie concert.
David’s agreeing to appear in a low-budget foreign movie, and the fact that he also wrote the songs and the music for it, was a clear testament to his belief in karma. In recent years, astrology, too, had become an important part of his life. Before he agreed to be interviewed by a particular journalist, he always insisted that the reporter submit his or her exact time and place of birth to him, so that he could draw up the person’s chart and employ the tarot in order to decide whether or not to grant that journalist an interview.
The world press continued to treat David with a combination of respect and fascination. And while there were those who felt that David had strayed far from the musical mainstream with his Berlin Trilogy, starting with Low, they were mollified when, in 1981, he released the far more commercial album Scary Monsters, which stormed to number one in the UK. Recorded without the participation of Brian Eno, Scary Monsters would give rise to two of David’s most iconic hit singles, “Fashion” and the track “Ashes to Ashes,” in which he made the shocking assertion, “Major Tom’s a junkie,” thus despoiling the image of the hero of “Space Oddity”—a classic Bowie move, remolding, recasting, then destroying his own creation, rather as he once did with Ziggy.
With Queen, at Mountain Studios, Montreux, he also wrote and recorded “Under Pressure,” which later appeared on Queen’s album Hot Space, and went on to reach number one on the charts. David’s unique connection with Queen’s Freddie Mercury dated back twelve years, to when—soon after the release and success of “Space Oddity”—he dropped by London’s Kensington Market to see Scottish rocker Alan Mair, a bassist he’d worked with who now ran a stall at the market selling handmade boots. It turned out that the stall was managed by Freddie Mercury.
Mair remembered, “I asked David if he wanted a pair of boots and he said no, that he didn’t have any money and had just come to say hello. I said, ‘But you’ve had a hit record.’ But in those days hit records didn’t mean a lot financially, initially, anyway.
“I said he could pay me whenever, and Freddie fitted him for a pair of boots. I introduced them. Freddie’s career hadn’t taken off at this point. I wish I had taken a picture of Freddie on his knees fitting David’s boots,” Alan said.
David and Freddie also had a high degree of professional mutuality. A brilliant songwriter, Freddie had not only written the eclectic classic “Bohemian Rhapsody” but also “We Are the Champions,” a song which, like “Heroes,” would become a sporting anthem. And as David himself phrased it, “Of all the more theatrical rock performers, Freddie took it further than the rest.”
After Freddie’s tragic death from AIDS, at the age of only forty-five, in 1992, David took part in the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness in Freddie’s honor, and in full view of the seventy-two-thousand-strong audience at Wembley Stadium, and the global audience of nearly one billion watching a live feed of the show, fell to his knees and recited the Lord’s Prayer for an (unnamed) friend of his then suffering the ravages of AIDS.
More than anything else, in the 1980s, David’s focus was on acting. In March 1982, he appeared in a BBC TV production of Brecht’s Baal, for which he received the standard fee of £1,000. Critics were underwhelmed by his performance. The same year, decades before Twilight, David had the foresight to play a vampire—John Blaylock in The Hung
er, in which he costarred with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. While shooting in London, David wore prosthetic makeup that aged him three hundred years; he was completely unrecognizable. On the set to visit his father, Zowie, at the time eleven years old, was so shocked by the sight of David that he burst into tears.
Ironically, David, who in his bid for stardom had worn makeup in order to attract attention, ended up employing it for the reverse reason now that he was a star.
“He enjoyed wearing the old-age makeup because he could nip out to the pub and no one would recognize him. I know he did that more than once,” Nick Dudman, assistant makeup artist on The Hunger, remembered.
During the making of the movie, David embarked on a relationship with Susan Sarandon, which was hardly surprising, given her street cred and rock-chick aura. Susan, who was from a Catholic family, had grown up in New Jersey where, in high school, she was arrested for civil rights protests. Sensual, sexy, and unconventional, and a startlingly beautiful woman, Susan Sarandon was, in many ways, yet another perfect woman for David. Calling her “pure dynamite,” he enthused, “Working with Susan was terrific.” (Tellingly, he didn’t mention Catherine Deneuve, who played his vampire wife in the movie.) At the time, Susan was seeing, and partly living with, Italian director Franco Amurri, and they had a child together. A free spirit, after filming ended, she carried on a three-year affair with David.
Both The Hunger and David’s next movie, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, were unveiled at the Thirty-Sixth Cannes Film Festival, where he was mobbed by thousands of fans, and riot police had to be called in to quell the crowd. Nonetheless, the movie was booed by the festival audience and received a pasting from the critics, with Rex Reed calling it “turgid pretentious kitsch.”
The Hunger premiered within two weeks of the premiere of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which David played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp.
“David Bowie plays a born leader in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and he plays him like a born film star,” Janet Maslin wrote glowingly in the New York Times, further enthusing, “Mr. Bow ie’s screen presence here is mercurial and arresting and he seems to do something slyly different in every scene.”
David did indeed have star quality, and by rights he should have been a far bigger movie star than he ended up being. Part of the reason may have been his tendency to ricochet from genre to genre, and to play dramatically different characters, thus confusing Hollywood’s more unimaginative powers-that-be. His divergent movies and the disparate parts he played had always been filled with as many contradictions as David himself is. Perhaps aware of the conundrum of his own making, he eventually attempted to cast light on his choices to make movies as varied as Just a Gigolo, and now Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
“I’ve never chosen films for roles. I’ve always chosen for the director who’s involved or for somebody in the cast. I’m in a privileged position, in that people are willing to take a chance on me,” he said.
While promoting Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in Cannes, David had an uncharacteristically open conversation with British journalist Hilary Bonner. “I feel tremendous guilt because I grew so apart from my family,” he said. “I hardly ever see my mother and I have a stepbrother [sic] I don’t see anymore. It was my fault we grew apart and it is painful—but somehow there’s no going back.”
Isolated from his family, yet content in his isolation, David continued to concentrate on his career to the exclusion of all else. In 1983, he made his highest-selling album ever, Let’s Dance, produced by Nile Rodgers and appealing to a new generation of fans who had never heard of Ziggy Stardust. The first single from the album, “Let’s Dance,” went on to become David’s first record to reach number one in both the British and the American charts.
The success of Let’s Dance came out of the blue for David—he had assumed that his biggest hit, “Fame,” was behind him. “I was quite comfortable in that position,” he said, “I thought, well, I’ve had my big deal, this is where I am. . . . Then the explosion happened when that song was a hit, and that really threw me for a few months. It just snowballed, it was unbelievable.”
To top that, “China Girl,” on the same album (which had been written by Iggy Pop and featured on his 1977 album, The Idiot) was a big hit—although, down the line, David would become disenchanted with it. When Rosie O’Donnell, a friend of his and Iman’s, who was obsessed with “China Girl,” interviewed him for her show in March 1997, she cracked, “I always ask him to sing that and he’s like, ‘I hate that bloody song. Shut up about it.’ And then Iman’s like, ‘I want to go to dinner but please don’t bring up ‘China Girl,’ Rosie, no.’ ”
Though David intimated that he was tired of doing songs from the eighties, nevertheless, “China Girl” did carry a personal resonance for him: When he was shooting the video in Sydney, he embarked on an affair with his twenty-three-year-old costar, Geeling Ng, and invited her to Europe, where they had a two-week affair. She was sweet and exuded normalcy, but in the end she was totally overwhelmed by all the trappings of his rock-star lifestyle and left the tour to return home to New Zealand with no hard feelings on either side.
All through the summer and fall of 1983, David performed his Serious Moonlight tour in sixteen countries, in which more than two and a half million fans attended ninety-six performances. Singer-composer Jonathan King, whom David had known in London at the start of his career and who had been one of his earliest and biggest champions in the music press, was now hosting a TV show in Britain. After a great deal of negotiating with David’s management, King arranged to fly to California to interview him at Anaheim Stadium, where he was performing on the tour.
Jonathan remembered, “I hadn’t seen David for fifteen years and I said to the crew, ‘This is going to be great!’ We set up in a dressing room, and David had loads of staff there, but we didn’t see him.
“Outside, there was a crowd, and then all of a sudden, a massive buzz, and sure enough, it was David, come to be interviewed. He comes in with ten other people. I say, ‘Hi, David.’ He sits down, looks at me, says, ‘You are a fat shit,’ and walks out again with his entourage.
“So we packed up and left the dressing room, but on the way out, we saw David’s guitarist, Peter Frampton. He and his girlfriend Mary used to stay with me quite often, so I said, ‘Peter, what the hell is going on?’
“And he said, ‘Well, I think there’s a bit of a problem.’ He tipped me a wink and didn’t say anything, but I put two and two together and the words ‘white powder’ came up in my head.”
After the Serious Moonlight tour, David followed up with the album Tonight, which featured the single “Loving the Alien.” In quick succession, he appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s $20 million tour de force Labyrinth, with Jennifer Connolly, and dedicated the movie to Zowie, in very much the same way as in 1978 he had recorded Peter and the Wolf with the Philadelphia Orchestra for his son as a gift.
While shooting Labyrinth, David was lighthearted, and during the scene with “Toby,” Jennifer Connolly’s younger brother, played by Toby Froud, thought nothing of acting on camera while all the time putting on a puppet show off camera to distract little Toby and stop him from crying.
As always when David made movies, Zowie, then twelve, was on the set. As a result, through contacts he met there, he would ultimately get his first job working for Muppets creator Jim Henson.
Although Labyrinth was to become a cult classic, David turned down the opportunity to play the part of the villain Zorin in the Bond film A View to a Kill.
“It simply was a terrible script,” he said, forthrightly. “I saw little reason for spending so long on something that bad . . . And I told them so. I don’t think anyone had turned down a ‘major’ role in a Bond before. It really didn’t go down too well at all. They were very tetchy about it.”
However, later on he added, “To be honest, I haven’t watched a James Bond film sinc
e Sean Connery was in them. I don’t really like them.”
On the other hand, he did agree to appear as himself in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander, judging the script, “too funny a script to walk past. An absolute hoot,” and also did a cameo playing a hit man, complete with mustache, who jams his gun into Jeff Goldblum’s mouth in John Landis’s Into the Night. That same year, he played Vendice Partners, an adman, in Absolute Beginners, modeling his transatlantic twang on that of his boss at Nevin D. Hirst during his advertising agency years. “I enjoyed playing him. He’s such a bastard,” David said.
The movie’s director, Julien Temple, had worked with him before on a video and was extremely impressed by him. “Bowie’s not only very interested in film, but he has a lot of knowledge about it,” he said. “I get a lot of input from him, which is very different from working with the Stones, who always want you to do everything yourself.”
Appearing in Absolute Beginners, in the part of Flora, was Mandy Rice-Davies, who hadn’t seen David since their lunch together at La Gioconda, almost twenty years before. “We didn’t have a scene together, but David came round to my dressing room and said, ‘Do you remember me? Do you remember the Gioconda?’ ” Mandy said. “He hadn’t changed at all. I went on the set and watched him. He was still a very self-confident young man.”
Patsy Kensit, the female star of the movie, was eighteen years old and utterly unraveled at the prospect of working with David. “I was beyond excited about that and expected him to instantly fall in love with me the moment he laid eyes on me (as you do when you’re eighteen),” she remembered. “There’s a brilliant scene in the film where David dances on top of a globe, and on the day it was being shot, the soundstage at Shepperton was packed because everyone wanted to watch him perform. We were all in awe of him, and he was amazing,” Patsy said.
He was a big star now, both of movies and of music, but somewhere inside, he still remained the romantic sixteen-year-old boy who had once wooed a fourteen-year-old girl, Dana Gillespie. Through the intervening years, he never forgot the secret of his success.