Bowie

by Wendy Leigh

  His relationship with Zowie, now Duncan, had become even closer through the years, particularly as Duncan was exhibiting talent as a film director, although he had never shown any aptitude as a musician. After working for Jim Henson and attending the London Film School, like his father before him, he took a job in advertising and directed a campaign for French Connection. Despite his fractured childhood and lack of a mother’s consistent love—so much in contrast with what the future held in store for Lexie—Duncan’s creativity had flourished, just as his father had intended.

  Apart from nurturing Lexie’s creativity, from the first, David was concerned with practical matters, as well. Getting up before Lexie every morning, although he balked at changing her diapers, he read out loud to her and played with her, taking turns with Iman. He was a proud father and boasted, “Lexie has enormous energy. She’s an absolutely extraordinary, vital child. And incredibly social.” And, “She is wonderful and probably, I believe, the most intelligent child that has ever been born. She is terribly physical and I think she’s mad for anything athletic. Running and dancing and getting bruises. She’s a lovely, lively child.”

  Resolving not to tour so much, like he did when Duncan was growing up, he insisted, “I don’t want to make the same mistakes with Lexie.”

  At the end of 2000, David made a cameo appearance in Mr. Rice’s Secret, a low-budget independent film, playing the small part of Mr. Rice, the kindly neighbor of a small boy suffering from Hodgkin’s disease. As Elvis Mitchell wrote in the New York Times, “Someone deserves the grand prize for persuading David Bowie to participate in this minor drama.”

  By way of an explanation, David said, “From the script, it was so thoughtfully and considerately conceived. Nothing smacked of the sensational. It could so easily have slipped into that hole given the subject matter. There was an active intelligence behind it all. . . . I have, on the whole, avoided Hollywood like the plague.”

  David was in America when, on April 2, 2001, his mother died in a nursing home in St. Albans, England. She was eighty-eight years old, and her death was sudden and a surprise to him. Since the mid-1980s, she had been spending three months each year at his home in Switzerland. But despite his largesse, true to form, Peggy had complained to her younger sister Pat that he was away for most of the time she had been there.

  Whether or not he had ever cared about pleasing his mother, the die had long ago been cast. However, unlike in the case of his half brother, Terry, David did attend his mother’s funeral, where Ken Pitt was in attendance, and so was his errant aunt Pat. Seeing her, David let the past fall away and hugged her as if bygones were bygones. Afterward, he made no comment about his mother, her life or her death.

  Peggy had been demanding, flamboyant, unloving, fanciful, a writer of poetry, a stickler for cleanliness and perfect manners, a long-distant, relatively silent supporter of his career, unemotional, unloving and, in many ways, his doppelgänger, his other self. And now she was gone.

  If he was suffering from the loss of his mother as he suffered in the wake of Terry’s suicide, David never revealed his feelings, but instead, threw himself into work, as was his wont. He was up in Woodstock with Tony Visconti recording his first album of the new millennium, Heathen, when the planes hit the Twin Towers. He saw the news and immediately called Iman in their SoHo apartment just two miles from the World Trade Center. From the apartment, Iman had a full view of the towers but had missed the first attack. She was still on the phone with David when the second plane crashed into the buildings. According to David, “She said, ‘Oh my God, another one has gone.’ I said, ‘You are under attack. Get the fuck out of there.’ ”

  With Lexie in the stroller, she ran twenty blocks away from the apartment to shelter and safety in a friend’s apartment. But to David’s horror, after that the phones went down and they lost contact with each other. “I didn’t speak to her until the nighttime,” David remembered. “I was in a right state. I just had no idea if she and Lexie got out. It was so, so horrifying. It was incredibly traumatic, one of the nastiest days of my life.”

  In the wake of September 11, 2001, on October 20, 2001, he performed at a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden: the Concert for New York City, to honor the New York City Fire Department and the New York City Police Department, their families, those lost in the attacks, and those who had worked in rescue and recovery.

  A year later, he released the Reality album via satellite, the world’s largest interactive event of its time, and then embarked upon the Reality tour. Bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, who had played with him for the last decade, said, “We are starting to find our footing as a band. Of course, as soon as it settles down, David always mixes it up again. He gets bored, so that helps to keep us on our toes.”

  Although he was still a bona fide rock star, he underplayed his fame and fortune, dressing in J.Crew, declaring a year later, “I’ve been a pretty regular guy over the past fourteen years, in the way that I live my life and my ambitions, which are very few these days. It’s about trying to keep my family unit together, really to try to create a secure and comforting nucleus for my daughter. If I’m looking further ahead, I’m usually looking through her eyes.”

  He had already rejected a life peerage in 2000 (which would have meant that he would have been made a baron for his lifetime, but that the title would not be passed on to his son), and in 2003, he was offered a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II. He rejected that as well, explaining, “I’m indifferent to royalty. I can’t remember the last time I thought about them. So I’m certainly not excited about the prospect of working for them. Accepting one of those things would make me feel owned, and I’m not owned by anybody. Not even the music industry,” he said.

  When asked how he felt about Mick Jagger, in contrast, accepting the knighthood, he shrugged and said, “It’s not my place to make a judgment on Jagger; it’s his decision but it’s just not for me. Am I anti-monarchy? I’d only have a serious answer to that if I was living in this country.”

  In November of that same year, David gave a concert at Wembley Stadium, the site of so many past triumphs, and chalked up yet another.

  He hadn’t taken drugs for many years, and had also given up drinking. According to Tony Visconti, he and David went to AA: “David found it very useful. We talk about being each other’s support system. If two people from the program sit together, that’s technically an AA meeting. Every two or three days we talk about it, although we don’t start and end with a prayer. I’ll say, ‘I’m coming up to my twelfth birthday,’ and he says, ‘Well it’s been my twenty-third.’ I ask, ‘Do you miss it?’ and he says, ‘I don’t miss it at all.’ ”

  At the end of 2003, he did a shoot with waifish supermodel Kate Moss, a South London girl who grew up in Croydon, just six miles from Bromley, and, like him, had dabbled in cocaine and was also a smoker. Although twenty-eight years separated David and Kate, they immediately bonded, and afterward, she enthused, “I’ve just been clinging to David Bowie naked. It doesn’t get better than that.”

  As for David, mindful of the age difference between them, he took on a paternal role, “She’s so young and smokes like a chimney. And she’s got such a gorgeous little body! It needs protecting,” he said.

  The following year, he and Iman paid over $1.5 million dollars for a sixty-four-acre estate outside Woodstock, New York. He fell in love with Little Tonche Mountain, as the property was called, when he was recording Heathen at a nearby studio. Afterward, he said of their new hideaway, “This is not cute, on top of this mountain: It’s stark, and it has a spartan quality about it. In this instance, the retreat atmosphere honed my thoughts. I’ve written in the mountains before, but never with such gravitas.”

  In June 2004, he was performing at the Norwegian Wood festival in Oslo when a crazed fan flung a lollipop in his eye. The missile actually wedged itself in his eye socket, and, given the childhood injury to his eye, he was palpably shocked. Fortunately, there was no permanent damage to t
he eye.

  By now he had been on the road for almost two years, promoting Reality, playing to audiences all over the world in a show that lasted two and a half hours. After playing Prague, where he was forced to cut the gig short because of a trapped nerve in his shoulder, he ended up in the German town of Scheeßel, where the pain in his shoulder increased.

  Admitted to hospital, his trapped nerve was treated, but during a checkup doctors found that he had suffered a heart attack while performing onstage, and at Hamburg’s St. George Hospital, chief cardiologist Karl-Heinz Kuck operated on him, fitting a special filter to his artery. Until the operation was over and a success, he said nothing to Iman, and she only heard the news four hours afterward.

  Advised not to tour, he went home to Manhattan. Strangely enough, he had given up smoking six months before he had the heart attack, which then came out of left field for him—but now he also gave up coffee in favor of decaffeinated coffee. But he still couldn’t convince himself to jettison performing forever, and in 2006, he performed with Alicia Keys at the Black Ball at the Hammersmith Ballroom in New York, in aid of the Keep a Child Alive organization. Afterward he thanked her, telling her that he wouldn’t have been able to sing again had he not got over his fears by performing that night.

  In 2006, he played the part of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla in the movie The Prestige. Scarlett Johansson was in the movie as well but, sadly for her, didn’t have any scenes with David.

  “My first ever crush was David Bowie in the movie Labyrinth,” she confessed. “I actually met him a year or so ago, backstage at one of his concerts. I couldn’t tell him he was my first love because I couldn’t actually speak when he shook my hand.”

  But despite his acclaimed appearance in The Prestige, he was bored with making movies and decided not to do any more. “On set, I end up sitting outside the trailer talking with people about God knows what. What a waste of a day just to be in front of the camera for fifteen minutes,” he said.

  In January 2007, he celebrated his sixtieth birthday. According to Iman, he didn’t freak out about it beforehand: “I guess that’s because he’s happy. We just lead a very simple family life,” she said.

  He had given up alcohol, was exercising on a daily basis, and said that he felt fantastic. That same year, he appeared in an episode of Ricky Gervais’s Extras, in which he did a cameo as himself, turning on Ricky by singing the song “Pathetic Little Man,” in a scene which some critics hailed as the funniest of the series.

  His heart attack plus his mother’s death had lent him intimations of mortality. “There’s a realization of an end looming,” he said. “And it becomes even more focused when you’ve got a small child.

  “How long have I got left? That’s the saddest thing in the world, because you have this realization that everything you love you’re going to let go of and give up. I look at Lexie and think there’s going to be a point when I’m not around for her. The thought of that is truly heartbreaking.”

  In 2010, he and Iman bought a three-bedroom villa in Saint Lucia. The villa was situated in the prime location of the Pitons, with a volcano on either side, and he and Iman loved the breathtaking views. Manhattan remained their primary home, and there, David was relaxed and unthreatened by fans or the public. “It’s easy to get about. Nobody looks at me twice. In New York, they don’t feel they have possession of you. They let you get on with your life,” he said.

  At home in Manhattan, David and Iman regularly entertain friends. They once threw a dinner party for singer Boy George, who said afterward, “Bowie was lovely, extremely charming. He cooked. I can’t remember what.”

  According to George, the conversation switched to Russian art house flicks, about which he knew very little, then turned to brands of English tea, what David loved about London, and what he missed about England. And in a surreal moment, David, who loves Cadbury Flake Chocolate and Sunday fry-ups, which Iman makes for him each week, confided to George that he was also a massive fan of the British soap EastEnders.

  At exactly 5 A.M. GMT on January 8, 2013, without any prior warning or fanfare, David released his new single “Where Are We Now?” accompanied by a video, to be followed by the release of his first new album in ten years, and his thirtieth studio album, The Next Day, two months later.

  With his perfect sense of drama, David had released his single on the morning of his sixty-sixth birthday. Within hours, the download of the track skyrocketed to number one, and the album went straight to the top of the presales chart.

  Mick Garbutt observed, “David is very aware that less is more. He doesn’t need to have a PR team, which was certainly proved by what he did on January 8, releasing a record with no promotion.

  “If you speak to people in the camp, they say that he had been in the studio for ages. Only David Bowie knew when he was ready. Then he gets more publicity.”

  As Chris Charlesworth, who had been David’s RCA publicist, put it, “Most artists of his stature, if a new record was coming out after a long period of nothing, there would be a fanfare, a team of PRs, and six months, three months, and they would build up expectations of the record, and if it wasn’t very good it would be a damp squib.

  “But Bowie was very clever not saying a word to anyone. No one had a clue he was making a new record. The release of the record became a news story itself. Everyone was taken by surprise—he created more press by doing nothing.”

  Afterward, producer Tony Visconti said, with a certain amount of glee, “I’ve been listening to this on headphones, walking through the streets of New York, for the past two years. If people are looking for classic Bowie, they’ll find it on this album. If they are looking for innovative Bowie, some new directions, they’ll find that on this album too.”

  David was till adept at stirring up publicity through his anarchic approach to music: The release of The Next Day album was to lead to controversy, with YouTube removing the promo for the single from its site because it “contravened the terms of use.” The offending video featured Gary Oldman playing a priest and Marion Cotillard playing a prostitute with stigmata, as if she has been crucified. David is on hand, in a smock. That video was followed by one for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” starring Tilda Swinton, a passionate David Bowie fan.

  During the first minutes of David’s sixty-sixth birthday, his son, Duncan proudly tweeted, “First off, it’s midnight in NY. That means, a HUGE HAPPY BIRTHDAY is in order to my lovely, very talented dad!”

  And then, “Would be lovely if all of you could spread the word about da’s new album. First in ten years, and it’s a good ’un.”

  Now, as always, Duncan was one of the greatest joys of David’s life. “I just thank my good fortune that we get on so well now. Any bridges that had been broken—and I don’t think many had been—are mended,” David said, later adding, “We get on famously. He is enjoying what he is doing in his life, and I am really enjoying seeing him being fulfilled.”

  After Duncan married photographer Rodene Ronquillo in 2012, straight afterward she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Since then, she and Duncan have fought to raise awareness of the disease.

  Fascinatingly, Duncan’s professional fulfillment, and his greatest success until now, came from directing the science-fiction movie Moon, about an astronaut who is the only inhabitant of a space station on a three-year tour of duty just coming to an end. The movie won Duncan countless awards, plus the inevitable comparison between Moon and “Space Oddity.” Through it all, David was unendingly proud of him.

  Once fascinated by Howard Hughes, for more than a decade David has seemed intent on emulating Hughes’s retreat from the world. Consequently, he turned down a plea to appear at the Olympics closing ceremony, although “Heroes” became the Games’ unofficial anthem, played rousingly as Britain’s team marched into the arena.

  His absence at the event, which would have been the crowning glory of his career, was perhaps a testament to the fact that for the past two decades, America, not
Britain, has been his home.

  Toward the end of 2013, he did make a cameo appearance playing the piano and singing the song “I’d Rather Be High,” from the album The Next Day, in a Louis Vuitton commercial. Starring twenty-five-year-old model Arizona Muse, and ostensibly shot at a glittering Venetian masque ball, the commercial shows David looking strained and ill at ease, yet in just the first two days after its release, there were 1,750,000 downloads.

  In Manhattan, where David and Iman live in a $4 million SoHo loft apartment, he has a panic room where the family can lock themselves in the eventuality of a home invasion. There are terraces, woodburning fireplaces, and twenty-six-foot-high ceilings, and the living room of the apartment is painted hunter green and decorated with suede, leather, and dark wood paneling.

  Sometimes David slips out of the apartment and, wearing a flat cap, a hooded jacket, and wraparound sunglasses, browses the books at McNally Jackson bookstore, but generally he spends most of his time in the apartment.

  Although David and Iman have been seen dining at Indochine, they are very rarely photographed on the streets of the city together. Instead, he has been photographed with the ever-present Coco by his side, still a central figure in his life forty years since she first became his personal assistant. For while Iman is clearly nurturing of and loving toward David, he has never been the sole fulcrum of Iman’s life, as he is of Coco’s.

  For a take on David, his marriage to Iman, and Coco’s role in it, Tony Zanetta, who first became close to David during his marriage to Angie, and has watched his evolution over the last quarter of a century, observes, “Iman has her own light, and until David married her, he always seemed to need all the light on him, and everything else was secondary.

  “Iman is a real powerhouse—she has her own thing going and she doesn’t need him for anything. She is more active than he is in many ways; she’s got her own business, she’s a strong independent person. But perhaps because Coco supplies his other needs, she allows the marriage to flourish.”