Bowie: A Biography (3 page)

Relationships started during wartime are often more passionate than those begun during peace and prosperity. Peggy, with her high forehead, elegant nose, pale skin and dark, humorous eyes, possessed a certain unconventional, very English beauty. Although willful and independent, she was not immune to the rush of untethered emotion that seemed to wash over her generation with the declaration of war. While working at the hotel, she began a relationship with an employee, a handsome Jewish Frenchman named Wolf Rosemberg (who called himself Jack). He worked as a porter in the bar. His father was a well-off fur dealer in Paris. Their affair began in secret in the spring of 1937. She believed that she had met the love of her life. Soon afterward, she learned that she was pregnant. Rosemberg proposed. Their first and only child, Terence Guy Adair Burns, was born in the local Pembury Hospital on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day (hence his middle name). Adair was a family name. Everyone called the baby Terry.

Jack and Peggy would never marry, and Terry would never really know his biological father. Early in 1938, the Nazis began annexing Eastern Europe and eventually invaded France. Jack returned to his family and joined up with the Resistance. He reappeared in London shortly before bombs began falling on Great Britain in ’39. Jack attempted to claim the baby but was rebuffed by Peggy’s mother, Margaret, as Peggy wasn’t at home at the time. Rather than waiting, Rosemberg disappeared, his impatience and urgency surely affected by the pervasive feelings of doom fast engulfing all of free Europe.

Distraught, Peggy, like many young British and American women, went to work in a munitions factory. She raised Terry with Margaret’s help. Peggy then entered into a rebound affair with a factory coworker. This led to another pregnancy, this time a daughter. Unable to care for both children on her own, she gave the child over to foster care when she was three months old and continued to make bombs and nurse her broken heart. In some ways, Peggy never got over Jack Rosemberg. He was “the one that got away,” and this sentiment would foment a resentment that would compromise the peace and optimism of Peggy and John’s second-chance home on Stansfield Road (especially after Terry grew into a ringer for his estranged biological father).

Compared with the Burns family, David’s father was from relatively stolid genetic stock. John’s influence surely had a calming, even a saving effect, on Peggy and David in both the postwar years as well as the increasingly chaotic 1960s, when David rebelled against his class and station and struggled to find success as a singer and songwriter. John’s father, Robert Haywood Jones, the source of David’s middle name, was a boot maker, and his mother, Zillah Hannah Jones, worked in an industrial wool mill. She died when he was very young. John was sent away to private school and like many British children of his age, he was subjected to a brutally strict rearing full of emotional suppression and harsh punishment for dissent. As a young man, he lost his crippling shyness in the dark of the local cinema. Jones, whose features in photos seem much more pinched than those of Peggy, as if he’s constantly straining to avoid saying something troubling or rebellious, became a great fan of escapist films, English music halls, American jazz—anything that temporarily relieved him of his painful diffidence. When his father passed away John inherited
a trust of three thousand pounds, to be paid out on the day of his twenty-first birthday in the fall of 1933 (about eighty thousand dollars by today’s rates). Jones decided to parlay the funds into a career in the entertainment business and some kind of permanent relief from his painfully quiet life. He left Yorkshire for London and fell under the wing of a fast-talking Irish would-be music hall impresario named James Sullivan.

Sullivan was married to a mysterious Italian circus performer who was said to have perished before a live audience during a stunt gone wrong. His blond daughter Hilda was confident and socially engaging, a showbiz kid with a head full of yellow curls. She played the piano, sang, danced and seemed to be naturally bred for the stage. John Jones, new to the capital and to “the business,” quickly became smitten. “He asked me to go and have a cup of tea with him,” Hilda Sullivan said, “and he fell madly in love with me. He was very taciturn; nothing made him laugh. You never saw his lips move and you never saw him smile.”

Shortly after their wedding, John happily and excitedly invested two-thirds of his inheritance money in a revue centered on Hilda’s estimable talent and charm. The production was booked into various burlesque stages throughout the region and met with utter failure. Despite her gifts, without a canny marketing plan, there was no interest in Hilda’s act among jaded music hall fans, who by that point had already heard and seen everything on the burlesque stages that glutted London: animal acts, pantomime and striptease. Unbroken, John decided to invest the remainder of his funds in a piano bar on well-populated Charlotte Street in the city’s Westminster section. He believed that there Hilda would build a following. The audience would soon come to her. They christened the club, perhaps unwisely, the Boop a Doop. Chastened by failure, John tabled his show business aspirations and took a job as a porter in a local hotel, the Russell. Hilda became a movie house usherette. Soon the couple began to argue about money and other relatively dreary domestic concerns. This tension reportedly led John Jones briefly to become a heavy drinker, but fortunately, it soon became apparent that he lacked the constitution. One night, after a prolonged pub visit, he became very ill and was taken by Hilda to the doctor and ordered to put down his tipple for good.

Although he abided, the discontentment with his offstage relationship with Hilda remained. John entered into a fleeting affair that produced
a baby girl named Annette. John and Hilda stayed together despite this infidelity and Hilda even agreed to raise the child as her own. The drama of it all seemed to ground John. It was as though he realized that his own life could be as turbulent as any film or kitchen-sink play. In the autumn of 1935, he took a job at Dr. Barnrado’s, a highly respected British children’s charity firm, and would remain there the next three and a half decades until his death in 1969, only leaving to serve in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War.

Hilda and Annette were living in Brixton during the war. John moved back in with them upon his return, and for a time, the marriage seemed to have survived. It was during this period, however, that John would meet Peggy and fall in love again. John initially came to Tunbridge Wells on business for Dr. Barnardo’s, but after spying Peggy serving tea, he began frequenting the Ritz quite a bit. You can almost imagine his intense stare. If he wasn’t quite her physical ideal, he impressed her with his manners and gentle way. Although he was still married to Hilda, the two began an affair that was more or less out in the open. For a short time, Peggy even stayed with John and Hilda. Hilda finally told him to leave and agreed to grant him a divorce.

John found the house at 40 Stansfield Road in early ’46. Once his legal papers came through, he and Peggy were married the following September. She was thirty-three and he was thirty-four. Both had found a relationship they could remain in, after searching for many years. Terry, a few months shy of his tenth birthday, would stay in Margaret Mary Burns’s care for a short time as he was enrolled in school. David was likely conceived that April.

In the October 1995 issue of British
Esquire
, journalist Ian Penman introduced to the world the concept of “Bowie Face.” “You think of Bowie and you think primarily of that Bowie Face through time,” Penman writes. Angie Bowie, in her memoir
Backstage Passes
, describes the adult Bowie’s features this way: “Perfectly structured to classical proportions—forehead to nose and nose to chin measurements being equal—with high, wide cheekbones pulled tightly down into a mischievously chiseled chin.” When considering the baby David Bowie in photos and in concept, it’s difficult to avoid pondering the exact moment this face became the unique Bowie Face and ceased to be merely a baby face. According to
Peggy, the nurse who aided his delivery into this world, on that frigid Wednesday morning, found him instantly remarkable.

“The midwife said to me, ‘This child has been on this earth before,’” David’s late mother told an interviewer. “I thought that was rather an odd thing to say, but the midwife seemed quite adamant.” The comment was the kind of sweetly witchy thing one might offer more than once if one were an itinerant midwife, moving from house to house once an alarm is sounded and the dilations begin. She notices five fingers on each hand, five toes on each tiny foot. She possibly regards the relieved and exhausted mother, who has been through this twice before. She makes note of the nervous father, who has been through this once before himself. Even if it wasn’t their first time, it was the first child of this particular union, one of relief and stability after chaos. It would have been almost impolite not to indicate that there was something special about the boy.

“He was a lovely looking baby,” Peggy’s younger sister Patricia Burns (later Antoniou) said, “always smiling and very placid. He never got into a temper.”

Music seemed to conjure this uniqueness very early on, which is also distinguishing. “If there was anything that caught his ear, he would fling himself about to the music,” Peggy recalled. “We thought he might be a ballet dancer.”

Life inside 40 Stansfield Road was comfortable but not exactly musical. A careful lack of demonstration now seemed the rule for John and Peggy. Fresh pots of tea were brewed in the afternoon and meals were frequently heated from cans of tuna fish and spaghetti; HP sauce was the only condiment in the cabinet, cod liver oil the only vitamin enhancement. Evenings were often spent listening to the wireless radio or quietly reading the newspapers.

Terry was invited to live with them once he’d completed his “eleven-plus” school requirements. By all accounts, he became the greatest supplier of unchecked emotion within these walls. David was lavished with hugs and kisses by all as an infant, but as he grew, outward displays of love came only from Terry. Terry himself was not shown much affection. He was fed, cared for and enrolled in Henry Thornton School in Clapham Common, a mile away. But the older child was treated by his mother and
stepfather with a form of cold kindness. Much was left unsaid inside 40 Stansfield Road.

As late as 1949, rubble from the Nazi air strikes could still be seen on city blocks of Brixton. Even those untouched by tragedy in any direct way were made to suffer well beyond the war’s end thanks to the inflated cost of living and scarcity of essential supplies like gasoline, food and material goods. The phones seldom worked and electrical power was unreliable. Following the Nazis’ formal surrender on May 8, 1945, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 of 1945, the United States became the world’s sole atomic superpower and overtook British culture as a spoil of war. American pop—jazz, Hollywood films, pulp novels—lacked the class of dance, theater and Romantic poetry, but soon the spoils of U.S. power would see them elevated and, inside of a decade, all but render the classic forms quaint and dusty. In one way or another, the global youth of the first postwar generation would be annexed by the booming pop nation that America had become.

The atomic age changed the language and culture in a profound and enduring way. Russia grew vast and wealthy in the postwar years, and by August of 1949, it too was a nuclear superpower. No longer a necessary ally of the Americans, Russia, under the paranoid and xenophobic Joseph Stalin, disengaged. Stalin was no fan of Frank Sinatra, Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola, which were considered corruptive. Victory and quieted munitions only seemed to illuminate the differences between America and Russia. The arms race between these rivals would, for all their cooperative war efforts, now end in mutually assured destruction if one or both giants pushed the conflict to the brink. Nearly a quarter of a million people were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The stalemate between the former allies promised to vaporize millions more in the same amount of time. The uncertainty of any future at all coupled with tales of horror and cruelty brought back by surviving soldiers elevated pop pleasures to a greater level of importance than they’d ever been. Cheap, fast pleasures became, for many, especially the young, the only pleasures that made sense during the Cold War years. This was the atmosphere that every child of David Jones’s age in England and America would grow up in. Sensory overload seemed newly practical. For his generation, pop was a powerful salve. Pop was everything.

2.

T

HE
H
IGH
S
TREET
in the southern London suburb of Bromley is full of cell-phone shops, Subway sandwich outlets and Starbucks coffee bars that renders it indistinguishable from those of Illinois or of New Jersey: a retail center, narrow, bright and full of pedestrians in casual uniform. A double-decker bus passes, carrying more of them home or to work. And yet there is a pair of favorite Bromley-ite sons who have done much to widen the gap between such humdrum environments and the progression of humankind into a wildly exciting future. In addition to being the town where David Jones came of age, Bromley is also the birthplace of Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells. Wells, the father of science fiction, often referred to as “the man who invented tomorrow,” was a progressive as well as a futurist.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
and
The War of the Worlds
upstage his essays and less imaginative works of fiction, but his novels
Ann Veronica
and
The Passionate Friends
championed the kind of liberated sexuality that David Bowie and his wife Angie would come to embrace over a half century later. Like the Bowies’, the Wellses’ marriage was open (and he and his wife Isabel also grew apart and divorced after only a few years). Wells enjoyed dozens of affairs (frequently with much younger women) well into his old age. Like David Bowie, the writer didn’t come from money. His mother and father operated a china shop. Herbert lived in the basement. He lost himself in books and the stars (gazing through a borrowed telescope at the country estate where his mother became a caretaker). Like Bowie, Wells used his discipline and intelligence to lift himself above his working-class station. Like Bowie, he showed discipline and aptitude early; he wrote his first novel,
The Desert Daisy
, at age ten (Bowie was taking lessons with acclaimed jazz saxophonist Ronnie Ross at twelve). Most important, like Bowie, Wells had one aim over all: to eventually find a way out of here.