by Wendy Leigh
“One day, I was sitting in the makeup chair. And he walked over to me, picked up a hairbrush, and started brushing my hair. He didn’t utter a single word, just put down the brush after he’d finished and left the room,” Patsy Kensit said.
SIXTEEN
ASHES
On January 16, 1985, David’s forty-seven-year-old half brother, Terry Burns, lay down on the railroad tracks, just yards in front of an oncoming express train then traveling at a speed of seventy miles an hour toward Coulsdon South station. It was too late for the engineer to brake, and all ten carriages rolled over Terry’s body and crushed him to death.
For Terry’s funeral, David, who had stayed away, ostensibly because he was afraid of all the press who might stampede the funeral, sent a basket of yellow and pink chrysanthemums along with a card that read “You’ve seen more things than we could imagine but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain. God bless you. —David.”
During David’s childhood and teens, Terry had exposed him to jazz, to coffee bars, to Soho, to subversive literature, and—as Terry was prone to smashing seats in the Astoria Brixton—to bad-boy rock-star behavior, as well. However, any nascent violence in Terry was not due to willfulness or a desire to rebel for rebellion’s sake, but to his mental and emotional instability. Back in December 1966, David and Terry had gone to a Cream concert at the Bromel Club together, and there, David witnessed his brother’s paranoid schizophrenia in full flower.
“I know that he was getting to a pretty tranced-out state watching Cream, because I don’t think he had ever been to something as loud as that in his life. I remember having to take him home because it was really affecting him,” David said in a 1993 interview on BBC Radio One.
He had always been concerned about Terry, cared about him, and had even taken Dana Gillespie with him to visit Terry at Cane Hill. But it was Angie who had shown Terry unlimited kindness, and who, in 1971, invited him to stay at Haddon Hall with her and David, leaving David perplexed.
“I’m not sure whether he’s kinda run away or what. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution. As for my brother, he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much,” David said at the time.
Terry’s idyllic sojourn at Haddon Hall was not destined to last long, and before, during, and after, as Angie revealed in her memoirs, David continued to be terrified that he might follow in Terry’s footsteps. Incarcerated in Cane Hill asylum, Coulsdon, Surrey, where his mother, Peggy, had committed him, in 1982, Terry tried to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window. He survived with a broken arm and leg and ended up in Mayday Hospital, Croydon, just seven miles away from Beckenham.
Hearing the news, David made a surprise visit to Terry, bringing with him gifts of a radio/cassette player, some books, and cigarettes. More important, he promised to get Terry released from Cane Hill. But no matter what David may or may not have attempted to do for Terry behind the scenes, Terry remained where he was. Around the same time, outraged by what she perceived to be David’s neglect of Terry, whom she loved as if he were her own son, David’s aunt Pat gave a series of interviews to Leni and Peter Gillman, then writing their biography Alias David Bowie.
“Pat talked to us because she was angry at David and wanted to get his attention. Terry was passionate about David, and David used to worship Terry, but when he became famous, it appeared to Pat that he wanted to put his relationship with his brother behind him,” Leni Gillman said. “Pat felt that Terry was being harmed by David’s neglect, and she hoped that by talking to us and giving the family perspective, it might cause David to put it right.
“Terry would say that ‘David said he was going to come and see me,’ ‘David said he was going to do this or that,’ but then nothing happened. David did write Terry some letters, but Peggy had probably told Terry that David was going to do this or that. She was giving Terry false hope, but I imagine she did it in good faith and she thought that David would do those things,” Leni said.
In December 1984, Terry made a second suicide attempt by throwing himself in the path of an oncoming express train. But just as the train roared closer and closer, he jumped out of the way. Then, before anyone could stop him, he grabbed a massive number of sleeping pills out of his pocket and swallowed them.
That suicide attempt failed. But on his next attempt, made just three weeks afterward, Terry succeeded in killing himself.
“Terry had such a bright mind and it was just awful that he would deteriorate like that,” David said afterward, and went on to muse as to whether or not he would one day suffer the same fate, relating his drug use to “attempting to be my brother.” It was an easy rationale, one that sat well with the press and didn’t give a glimmer of what David, who grew up worshiping Terry, really felt about his half brother’s suicide.
However, his aunt Pat would never forgive him for Terry’s incarceration and untimely death. As she confided in journalist Amanda Cable seven years after Terry’s suicide, David’s neglect of Terry had run so deep that even though she had repeatedly written to him to beg for cash so that Terry could be transferred from the grim Cane Hill asylum to a gentler, more luxurious private clinic, David did not.
“He left Terry for nineteen years in a mental home without sending a penny for private treatment,” Pat said. Then, in a moment of insight, she added, “Terry was handsome, charming, and intelligent. But when he fell ill David didn’t want to know, because it was a reminder that the same thing could happen to him because it ran in the family.”
In 1985, David performed at Live Aid, for which he initially intended to do a transatlantic duet with Mick Jagger. However, after deciding that the logistics were against them, David proposed that they do a duet with one of them singing from inside a space shuttle and the other one singing down on earth. Unsurprisingly, NASA was not prepared to lend them a space shuttle, so Mick and David recorded “Dancing in the Street” together. Originally, their duet was supposed to be live, with one of them in Philadelphia and the other in London, but the idea was scuppered owing to technical problems.
Consequently, the duet was recorded in London’s Docklands, with just Mick and David, alone, and there was a strong homoerotic vibe to the taping. Although David was happy with the first take, Mick was not. Throughout the whole process, David was friendly to the musicians and anyone else on set, but Mick was not. Nonetheless, David and Mick’s rendition of “Dancing in the Street” hit number one on the UK charts and stayed there for four weeks.
Kevin Armstrong, who put together David’s Live Aid band, felt extremely positive about David and observed, “I don’t think he’s quite so Machiavellian as people make out, or so calculating. . . . He has quite a sort of boyish enthusiasm for something and he’ll just follow it.”
David ended his Live Aid performance by introducing “Heroes” and dedicating it “to my son, to all our children, and to the children of the world,” and was met with tumultuous applause.
To some outsiders, it might have seemed as if David and Mick’s rivalry was still in full flower, but they had shared so much, even the same women, and by now were friends—so much so that Mick and Jerry invited David and Coco to spend Christmas with them at their Mustique estate. Captivated by the beauty of the island, and by the privacy, David immediately bought a plot of land close by and set about commissioning architects and designers to work on building his Caribbean paradise.
Apart from being a bastion of billionaires, blue bloods, and superstars, Mustique is also dominated by classic Caribbean architecture, and although David did follow in Mick’s footsteps by purchasing a property there, as much a nonconformist as ever, he said, “I wanted something as unlike the Caribbean as possible,” and designed and commissioned an Indonesian-style estate, high on a hill, with lush Japanese gardens dominated by koi ponds, a swimming pool cut into the hill, and romantically beautiful Balinese pavilions. When work on the estate was completed, David was so happy with the r
esult that he declared in an interview with Architectural Digest, “My ambition is to make music so incredibly uncompromised that I will have absolutely no audience left whatsoever. Then I’ll be able to spend the entire year on the island of Mustique.”
Whenever Joe spent his vacations in Mustique with his father, it was akin to paradise. “I’d go to Basil’s Bar, eat some banana bread, eat some lobster, watch films, have a swim. The whole Jagger clan would be down there,” he recalled.
During much of the eighties, David and Joe shared their spells on Mustique with the new love in David’s life, the beautiful Melissa Hurley, who is twenty years his junior. They first met when David’s Glass Spider tour hit L.A., and Melissa was one of the dancers in the show.
Born in Vermont, Melissa, then twenty to David’s forty, was a statuesque, elegant ballet dancer, a soloist with the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet. Beautiful, with long legs and a talent for doing the splits effortlessly, she had show business in her blood. Not only did she dance the tango in the movie Rent, but later on, in 1990, she also costarred with Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven.
With Melissa, an all-American girl with style, class, and good manners, David experienced a relatively conventional relationship. And although he had been dallying with Hawaiian model Marie Helvin and English aristocrat Sabrina Guinness (whom he invited to Wimbledon, and to Mick Jagger’s birthday party for his then girlfriend, Jerry Hall), he gradually settled into a more regular way of life with Melissa. Careful not to expose her to too much publicity, he made sure that they never arrived at or left a restaurant together. Consequently, they were very rarely photographed in tandem.
A shadow fell over their relationship early on during the Glass Spider tour, when he was charged with raping a thirty-year-old makeup artist named Wanda Lee Nichols at Dallas’s Mansion on Turtle Creek Hotel, where he was staying. After two years, the claim was dismissed when Wanda failed a lie detector test and it was also proved that she’d met David at a party at 2 A.M., spent the night with him, and then sent him a thank-you note in the morning. However, when he refused to see her the following evening, she pressed charges against him.
With the charges dropped, happy with Melissa, and at the top of his game professionally, around the same time David enthused, “I’m more like I was in 1967 now, say, than I was in 1977. I feel like I am, anyway. I feel as bright and cheerful and as optimistic as I was then—as opposed to feeling as depressed and sort of nihilistic, as I was in the seventies. I feel like I’ve come full circle in that particular way,” he said.
After proposing to Melissa during a romantic trip to Venice, in January 1990 David went so far as to confirm in the press that they were getting married: “I have absolutely no idea when exactly the wedding will be, but we’re engaged, and a wedding is what that usually leads to.”
However, soon after, their relationship ended amid speculation that Melissa hadn’t been strong enough for David, and that in the end, the age difference between them had contributed to the rift. Later, David characterized their relationship as “one of those older men, younger girl situations where I had the joy of taking her around the world and showing her things. But it became obvious to me that it just wasn’t going to work out as a relationship, and for that she would thank me one of these days.”
Melissa went on to marry David Cassidy’s half brother Patrick.
In the wake of David’s relationship with Melissa, it seemed as though their time together had taught him to value peace and happiness. Now in his forties—and perhaps in part thanks to the perspective that the age difference between him and Melissa had afforded him—David was finally primed to embark on an intimate, lasting relationship with a woman. During the Sound+Vision tour (having overcome his fear of flying somewhat), he took a flight from Madrid. On the plane, guitarist Adrian Belew noticed David leaf through a magazine, then stop at one particular page and comment, “This girl’s interesting.”
Her name was Iman.
But before he met her and his life became utterly transformed, he made a stab at returning to his roots, by becoming one fourth of a band called Tin Machine. And although drummer Hunt Sales cracked, “The thing that makes us different from other bands is that the lead singer’s a millionaire,” David did his utmost to be one of the boys, even insisting that no journalist interview him without the rest of the band present. Far more of a team player now than he had ever been in the early days with the King Bees, the Kon-rads, or any of his other bands, he was now happy to share the spotlight because he no longer had anything to prove.
When Tin Machine played the Brixton Academy in November 1991, in an exercise in nostalgia, David asked the tour’s bus driver to make a detour on the way to the venue and drive down Stansfield Road, Brixton. According to Tin Machine guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, who confided this to biographer Paul Trynka, David began crying and through his tears said, “It’s a miracle. I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how this all happened.”
His spectacular rise to fame and fortune might have been a mystery to him (although it is highly likely that, if pressed, he would have come up with a vast number of valid reasons for his success), but nothing could have prepared him for the romantic fairy tale in which he was about to be cast in the leading role. In retrospect he was to say, “Over the years I’ve become a very buoyant, happy character; 1989 was the period I realized for the first time in my life that I was an exceptionally lucky man. Many things, such as meeting my wife, made me realize that I should bless every damn moment I am alive because I was having, and have, an extraordinary life.”
As it happened, the deus ex machina who set David’s fairy-tale ending in motion was a Los Angeles hairdresser named Teddy Antolin. The date was October 14, 1990; the occasion, a birthday party for Teddy, at which David and Iman were both guests. Later, they would classify their first meeting as a blind date, but there was nothing prosaic about David’s first reaction to Iman.
“I was naming the children the night we met. I knew that she was for me; it was absolutely immediate. I just fell under her spell,” David said, then elaborated, “It was so lucky that we were to meet at that time in our lives, when we were both yearning for each other.”
The very next day, Iman flew out of L.A. bound for a fashion shoot, but when she arrived back, David was on the tarmac, waiting for her. The bisexual, promiscuous, try-anything sex addict who’d go to bed with anyone had miraculously evolved into a romantic, love-struck swain.
David proposed to Iman on October 14, the following year, on a boat floating up the Seine, while in the background, a pianist he had hired just for the evening played romantic standards as David serenaded her with “April in Paris,” the song that would one day be played at their wedding. Iman’s engagement ring dated back to eighteenth-century Florence, and, on a more modern level, as part of consummating their relationship, each of them would submit to having a tattoo. Iman had a Bowie knife tattooed above her ankle, with the word David written on the handle and his name in Arabic lettering tattooed around her belly button. David got a tattoo of a man riding a dolphin on his left calf. A frog rests on the man’s left hand, and there is a Japanese translation of the Serenity Prayer superimposed on both the man and the dolphin. Afterward, David proudly explained that he had the tattoo done “as a confirmation of the love I feel for my wife and my knowledge of the power of life itself.”
And when Iman expressed her feelings about David, they were interchangeable with his for her. “I have found my soul mate with whom sexual compatibility is just the tip of the iceberg. We have so much in common and are totally alike in a lot of things,” she said. Moreover, as she put it, “David has his feminine side. I have a masculine side.”
If her remark is slightly reminiscent of the days when David and Angie swapped gender roles on a regular basis, his marriage and his life with Iman were destined to be diametrically opposed to the marriage and life he had once led with Angie. At separate times, journalist Noreen Taylor Greenslade int
erviewed Angie and Iman. “Iman and Angie are both strong women. The two women represent both ends of his life: Angie the drug-fueled sixties and seventies, and Iman the New York life,” Taylor Greenslade said.
“Angie was full of angst and bitterness, the woman cast aside. I know that she claims she was seminal in creating him, but I didn’t see anything in her to inspire him. If she had some talent, it would have come out since they divorced, but it hasn’t. Angie is a very destructive part of his life.
“Iman is an intelligent woman, a businesswoman, she’s got a great sense of humor, she’s very wry, and she has irony. She exudes calm,” Taylor Greenslade said.
Poised, self-sufficient, highly intelligent, and startlingly beautiful, Iman was the exact antithesis of Angie. In fact, Angie was a million miles removed from Iman, the second Mrs. Bowie, just as David was now a million miles removed from his other self, David Jones.
SEVENTEEN
HEROINE FOR MORE THAN JUST ONE DAY
I man Mohamed Abdulmajid was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, the product of a great romance between her mother, Marian, and her father, Mohamed. At fourteen, Marian was destined for an arranged marriage with an older man. Instead, she fell madly in love with a seventeen-year-old Arabic teacher from Ethiopia, Mohamed, and together they eloped.
Iman, born in 1955, was originally named Zahara, but her grandfather renamed her Iman, which is a man’s name, and which, Iman believes, makes her the only girl in Somalia named Iman. Being given a man’s name, she says, has had a very specific impact on her life and her psyche. “I am very in touch with my masculine side. I am as independent as Somalia,” she has said, proudly.