Bowie: A Biography (17 page)

There’s a point in most people’s lives where they just stop. I dress, for example, the same way I dressed in 1984. That was the moment that I decided that I’d happened on a lasting look à la John Cooper Clarke, the Mancunian punk poet. Bowie did not stop. By late ’67 and very early 1968, he’d discarded mod for hippie full-on. Like many in England at the time,
he was aware of the American war in Vietnam but was more prone to carrying on with a sort of cultural or social politics as opposed to a street-fighting-man activism. “We weren’t particularly politically concerned, not at that time,” John Hutchinson explains. “It was more about the personal expansion. Buddhism and, uh, world peace. But I don’t think we were connected to the Vietnam War the way we would become in ’73 when half of our road crew were Vietnam vets.” The notion that a couple could nest in a hippie love pad, grow and eat their own vegetables, get stoned on hash at the Middle Earth club and change the world via a sing-along or a piece of dance performed on some patch of lawn in Regent’s or Hyde park still held, and for a time, that was exactly the kind of lifestyle Bowie was happy to lead with his first real love.

Hermione Farthingale was not her real name. As far as stage names go, it was fitting, as many who knew her remember her as profoundly old world in her beauty. “An English rose,” as Lindsay Kemp describes her. Photos suggest her skin was uncommonly pale, almost white. Her chin was strong and her lips were wide and thin as though naturally pursed. She had a dancer’s body, compact and muscular. Her hair was a remarkably thick reddish brown, and she wore it in long curls, as was the hippie style of the day. She resembled a more ethereal and soft Vanessa Redgrave.

Bowie was frustrated with Kenneth Pitt’s difficulty finding him a new record deal. In an effort to preserve whatever momentum they’d had with the Visconti-produced Deram singles and their commitment to launching David as an all-around entertainer, Pitt figured if one aspect is not working at the moment, best to pursue another. He found David commercial work, selling Lyons Maid ice cream. The ice cream company was intent on cashing in on the hippie culture with their new Luv brand. In the commercial, Bowie, in a shaggy cut, is seen running upstairs while the jingle’s “Luv, Luv, Luv …” strains to be youthful and infectious. “Now with pop cards!” Bowie is heard to say at its end. Whatever “pop cards” were (tradeable giveaways with Peter Max–style graphics on them, one could assume), they didn’t pay the bills. Bowie, as well as Marquee scene pal Dana Gillespie, auditioned for and failed to get a part in the British production of the touring company of the hippie musical
Hair
as well. “We both got turned down, can you believe it?” Gillespie says.
“Those bastards. But it was only for the touring company to go to Amsterdam, but the whole course of both of our lives might have changed had we been accepted.”

Bowie did manage to find a small role in a BBC production of “The Pistol Shot,” based on an Alexander Pushkin short story (as part of the network’s
Theatre 625
series). The episode, which aired May 20, 1968, featured Bowie as a dancer in a key scene. It was on the set of “The Pistol Shot” that he met Hermione, another Kemp student who, like Bowie, also got the job on his recommendation.

“Well, when we were really hard up, and we were always hard up, I got a job dancing. I was asked if I could find other dancers for a television production of this play that had a ballroom sequence,” Kemp says, “so I took David along and he met Hermione there, who was one of the dancers.”

Unlike Bowie, Hermione was classically trained in ballet and knew ballroom dancing as well. “Hermione was very nice, and extremely intelligent,” Kemp says, “and I was very fond of her but I wasn’t so fond, so happy to see them, you know, leave the studio together …” Kemp was, at the time, in love with Bowie himself and imagined that they were a couple. “I suppose in one’s youth one always hopes that love will last forever,” he says today. “Yes, I didn’t think of it as only lasting for as short a time as it did. We tend not to think about that. [After Hermione] it became extremely agonizing. And there were a lot of other ladies, you see. He never made any commitment to me or anything like that, he didn’t slip a ring on my finger. There were no promises, but it was incredibly painful, especially when it was with the ladies [like Hermione] that we were working with at the time.”

The minuet that David and Hermione danced featured both dressed in powdered wigs and eighteenth-century costume. Their courtship, however, would be done while costumed in shawls and beads and other hippie accoutrement. Hermione, whose father was a well-to-do lawyer, lived very comfortably in London in a small Victorian house with a front garden. Before long they were cohabiting, and both David’s parents and Ken Pitt saw very little of him. Theirs was a life of hippie bliss for a time. They’d prepare macrobiotic meals and discuss art, Buddhist philosophy and Romantic poetry, while the world outside seemed vulgar and misguided.
On weekends, they’d take a trip out to the country and sunbathe in the nude. “We were naturists for the day,” Visconti, who was also deep into his hippie trip, recalled in his memoir.

It was his first adult relationship, and one that demanded, even in those enlightened, free-loving times, a bit more of a sacrifice or sense of commitment than he was willing to give at his young age and with his often opportunistic but still fearless and enthusiastic attraction to both men and women, something Hermione did not know about and would not likely have approved of. She looked the part, with her natural, flowing hippie hair, but like most hippies, she was actually upper-middle-class, a well-to-do lawyer’s daughter with values likely rooted more in her parents’ world than in the fast-waning Age of Aquarius. She certainly inspired the twenty-one-year-old Bowie, and in an effort, perhaps, to ground both his personal and professional endeavors, he and Hermione, along with a local rock guitarist named Tony Hill, formed a performance troupe named Turquoise in early 1968.

Hill was in the process of assembling his own band High Tide when his manager informed him that one David Bowie was searching for a guitarist for a strange new kind of act. Hill met Bowie and discovered they had some musical chemistry. He ended up jamming with Bowie and Visconti, and later became a full-time member of Turquoise. Hill found Bowie’s “strange, sort of folky songs” intriguing but didn’t know what to make of the delivery at their early folk club gigs.

“David and Hermione did some artistic ballet work along with the music,” Tony Hill says today. “She was a ballet dancer and he was into Marcel Marceau. It was a little over my head, but I just carried on regardless. I got on with them well, but it was very unusual.”

Hill thinks the wigged-out Turquoise was a direct reaction to Bowie’s increasing frustration with Pitt’s management style, which, as the London pop scene flew headlong into an age of new enlightenment, could have seemed hopelessly outdated. Turquoise felt like the path of least resistance, as well as at least a superficial opportunity to give the middle finger to “the man.” He wasn’t making any money, so why not take loot out of the equation and perform for the “art” of it all? Although he never recorded Turquoise, Visconti remained within the social fold, while Pitt, the father figure, as well as Bowie’s own mother and father, were relegated to the
adults’ table. Hermione, Tony Visconti and his girlfriend approximated a new kind of family energy, communal and hopeful, genuine and warm.

Predictably, although Pitt thought very highly of Hermione, he was not remotely interested in joining in the crunchy festivities anyway. He was bewildered by David’s enthusiastic description of the new “act.” “I do not know how much David’s brush with cabaret influenced his decision to form a multimedia trio, the soft sound of which was the antithesis of cabaret brashness,” Pitt wrote. “Perhaps he had been thinking about it before and had been wondering how best he could incorporate Hermione in his activities.”

Bowie encouraged her to sing, but it was clear that the couple’s romantic chemistry was much stronger than their creative chemistry. As a singer, Hermione was … a great ballet dancer. “She had a passable voice,” Pitt observed charitably.

When Hill left to form his own group later in the year, Turquoise mutated slightly into a more musically sound venture with the return of John Hutchinson. Since leaving the Buzz, Hutchinson had spent time in Montreal, working for Air Canada to support his wife and young child, but also absorbing the Canadian folk scene, whose brightest lights included Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. He had no idea that Bowie too had abandoned R & B and the boisterous, brassy pop sound for something quieter.

“I’d become more interested in acoustic songs,” Hutchinson says. “I’d learned how to fingerpick. When I came back, I’d more or less turned into a more folky kind of player. When I got in touch with David to see what he was doing, I’d found that he’d gone the same way, by a different route. He started to appreciate different kinds of songs. He didn’t need a band to pump it out anymore. He was into softer things. So we’d both changed. What he could use from me was my acoustic guitar picking. We also found we could harmonize.”

With Hutchinson replacing Hill, the trio rechristened themselves Feathers. Given the kitsch that goes along with a background in folk-mime, a lot is made of Bowie’s tenure in both Turquoise and Feathers, but in actuality, there were only about a handful of performances on college campuses like Sussex University and at local art centers in and around London. Club dates were rare. Feathers played the Roundhouse in London
on September 14 and the hippie Middle Earth Club on the following day. One of their final shows was at the Marquee in January of ’69. During their sets, Hutchinson would play his acoustic. Bowie would play his twelve-string Gibson and the trio would harmonize on Bowie originals like “When I’m Five” and covers of Jacques Brel, the Belgian singer and actor whose histrionic and highly romantic numbers were also favored by Scott Walker—a Bowie hero. There were also mime interludes. It did not set the world on fire.

“Ghastly,” says Lindsay Kemp. “I was there, I was invited and there were just a handful of people there, and I was utterly unimpressed. Unimpressed by David’s mime, because at that time he was imitating Marcel Marceau, which is a very different kind of mime than I do, I mean a very different kind of mime; my mime is much more expressive. It’s much more of a dance mime as opposed to the French pantomime. Even though I studied with Marceau and I passed on what I learned from Marceau to Bowie. But then David went off into that awful kind of white-faced striped shirt mime routine. He did it because he loved it. He loved to mime and Marcel Marceau and white faces and striped shirts. Whereas I have a great talent as a mime but absolutely no talent as a singer, he has a great talent as a singer-songwriter, but not as a mime.”

Others, like the London-based photographer Ray Stevenson, found Bowie’s mime forays to be perfectly in keeping with the sway of the culture. “The mime stuff. I’m not very big on that but I think he brought something fresher to it,” he says, “Marcel Marceau that was my idea of mime, but I recall seeing Bowie doing a mime of an old guy walking down the street with a bent back. He stops to pick up a discarded cigarette and it’s a joint. Then he stands up straight, has a great time smoking, and as it wears off, he goes back to his bent back. Marcel Marceau wouldn’t have done that.”

After the shows, the incense would be lit and hash joints passed around. Maybe a little money would be exchanged for their efforts, but that was not the point.

“In Feathers, he was happy,” Hutchinson says, “the happiest I’d seen him. The fact that Ken Pitt didn’t understand it didn’t really bother David. It was the social thing that was the big deal. It was what was happening in London in those days, the Middle Earth, the hippie movement. David was
drawn into that and he and Hermione lived in that kind of hessian-and-lace kind of society. I wasn’t from that background. I took a job, and that turned out to be a good idea because Feathers made absolutely no money.”

David and Hermione’s private life was so hermetic that many in Bowie’s social circle claim that they never really got to know her beyond superficial observation. “We were too close, thought alike and spent all the time in a room sitting on the corner of a bed,” Bowie has said. For Bowie enthusiasts, she remains Sphinx-like. Even the fastidious Peter and Leni Gillman, authors
of Alias David Bowie
, were unable to uncover any information on her whereabouts. “We tried very hard to find her but failed,” Peter Gillman wrote to me in an e-mail. “Good luck.”

I was unable to locate Hermione as well despite continued efforts. Some people don’t want to be found by David Bowie biographers. Ex-manager Ralph Horton is another who rarely surfaces, if at all. Unlike Horton, the silence suits the myth of Hermione. There is little to remember her by except the music that David began writing after their breakup, songs tinged with heartbreak and regret that seemed authentic and no longer borrowed or imitated. Falling in love and screwing it up gave him some gravitas. His darker forays would never again seem so juvenile.

“Where she was from and what she had done was a bit of a mystery,” Hutchinson says. “I knew Hermione was not her real name. But reinventing yourself like that was not common in those days. I think she was maybe the daughter of somebody very famous and didn’t want it known that his daughter was a hippie. All I knew was that was it. She spoke very well. She was obviously well educated. And she’d been a dancer. So she knew all about show business but not rock ’n’ roll business. I don’t think she would have joined a rock ’n’ roll band. For a while, I think she was okay with the scene. She just leant what she could lend to what David was into.”

David’s rock ’n’ roll lifestyle would ultimately be the undoing of his relationship with Hermione. He didn’t know any other way to live and pursued affairs and kept hours that she eventually could no longer abide, and soon there was tension in hippie heaven. “I was totally unfaithful and couldn’t for the life of me keep it zipped,” he confessed to
Mojo
in 2002. “I’m sure we would have lasted a good long time if I’d been a good boy.”