Bowie (10 page)

MODERN LOVE

A
lthough David’s betrayal of both Natasha and Lindsay had tarnished his relationship with them, albeit temporarily, he still carried on seeing them—in particular, Lindsay, who had awakened him to the world of Kabuki, to Jean Genet, and even the music hall. In return, David introduced him to Buddhism, which he was then exploring. Still, no matter how cavalier David’s behavior to him had been, Lindsay still loved him. Years later he would continue to revel in the fact that those who learned of their affair would be lost in wonder: He imagined them asking themselves, “Can this bald-headed old queen have been Bowie’s boyfriend?” he said.

As David’s work with Lindsay’s mime group wound down, Ken Pitt was still struggling manfully to promote David’s career and get him bookings, but he was increasingly finding that David was defying him by ignoring his professional advice and disappearing for days on end. Finally, David moved out of Ken’s apartment, ostensibly returning to live with his parents again in Plaistow Grove.

The truth, though, was that David had fallen hard for a woman, a fragile, beautiful English rose named Hermione Farthingale. They met for the first time at one of Lindsay’s dance classes in London’s
Covent Garden, and in the spring of 1968, they both danced in
The Pistol Shot
, a BBC TV play. So it was that, for the first time in his life, David was in love in a conventional way, with a relatively conventional woman, one who came from a prosperous middle-class family, a cut above his own.

Away from performing, David and Hermione, a trained classical ballet dancer, swiftly became close, despite the fact that her father, an attorney, didn’t particularly approve of David. Her father’s approval, however, didn’t matter much to Hermione.

“We were twin souls, very alike. I was fascinated by him, this fey, elfin creature,” she said.

For a while, Ken didn’t learn about the advent of Hermione in David’s life. “David used to tell Ken he was going to go to Hampstead Heath to watch for flying saucers and UFOs, when he was actually going to see Hermione,” Michael Armstrong said.

David managed to sustain his deception for a while, but soon it became clear to him that he needed to escape from Ken’s jealous possessiveness of him. Consequently, he moved into the house that Hermione shared with other aspiring artists at 22 Clareville Grove, in London’s Kensington district. He was now twenty-one, and Hermione nineteen. They were both beautiful, and Hermione, in her natural incarnation, and David in his freshly acquired current one, were idealistic and determined to live a bohemian lifestyle together.

For a few months, their love and life together appeared to be idyllic. So much a product of the Summer of Love, of hippie ideals, their joint enterprise, Feathers (a multimedia group comprised of David, Hermione, and John Hutchinson, singing the songs of Jacques Brel and of David doing mime), and their youth itself attracted the attention of the media. They were selected as two of the subjects for a prestigious feature for
the Times
titled “The Restless Generation,” written by Sheila More and published on December 11, 1968.

Ironically, none other than Mick Jagger was also featured in the same article as typifying his generation, along with his then girlfriend,
Marianne Faithfull, and Tony Visconti’s future wife Mary Hopkin, who had just hit the charts with her wistful “Those Were the Days.”

While Mick railed against convention and the older generation (“When you grow up, you become a thinking person, you can’t stay a child, and some parents just can’t take that.”), David came off as more nihilistic: “We feel our parents’ generation has lost control, given up, they’re scared of the future,” he said, adding, “I feel we’re going to make an even greater mess of it. There can only be disaster ahead.”

His relationship with Hermione would endure for more than a year. Then, after she came back from Norway, where she was filming the small part of a dancer in
Song of Norway
, she announced to David that she had fallen in love with one of the dancers on the movie and went on to end her relationship with him. His heart was broken, and even in 2000, he still had her letters. Devastated by this once-in-a-lifetime romantic rejection—his first and last—he would turn to Dana Gillespie for comfort, turning up at her South Kensington cottage in floods of tears.

Despite his heartache over losing Hermione, professionally he knew he had no choice but to move on. By the next year, he was running the Beckenham Arts Lab and trumpeting it in suitably politically correct terms. “I run an arts lab, which is my chief occupation,” he declared to
Melody Maker
. “I think it’s the best in the country. The people who come are completely pacifist . . . we started our lab a few months ago with poets and artists who just came along.”

Steve Dube was a young reporter when he covered David and the Arts Lab. “I remember his eyes in particular because they were a different color. He was wearing bell-bottom trousers and a flowery shirt and looked like a hippie,” Steve said. “I remember thinking that I liked him. He was a nice guy and was straight with me. Some people bend over backwards to create a good impression on a journalist. I didn’t think that David was trying to create a favorable impression. He wasn’t trying to sell himself; he was interested in what he was doing and in the people he was doing it with. I liked that.”

However, David was still looking for work, either in the theater or in movies, and he got a part in a live TV two-character play,
My Country ’Tis of Thee
, with Lesley Joseph, then a student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

“We were playing two hippies who were at a police station, and I can’t remember much more about the play. David was a typical working actor,” Lesley said. “I remember that he invited me to the Arts Lab, but I didn’t go.”

By now David was living in Beckenham with a new girlfriend, journalist Mary Finnigan, a divorcée with two children, a free spirit who came from a middle-class background but who also had a subversive streak that had led her to experiment with drugs and which ended with her serving a short time in London’s Holloway Prison for women.

Radical and liberated, Mary fell hard for David, and soon he was singing in a local folk club and taking hash with her in his spare time. However, little though Mary knew it, true to form, David was not faithful to her. Apart from still dallying with Ken Pitt, who continued to be his manager, once a week, David would also spend the night in London with thirty-three-year-old Chinese-American A&R man Calvin Mark Lee, a flamboyant, flirty, effeminate character from San Francisco who wore a glittering red love jewel on his forehead and was a doctor of pharmaceutical chemistry.

Looking back at his affair with David, Lee often questioned whether or not David’s interest in him had been prompted by the fact that he was the influential assistant head of record label Mercury’s European office. Calvin and David first met in 1967, after Calvin sent David fan letters, care of Ken Pitt, some of which were laced with passionate love declarations. David was not immune to Calvin’s sentiments and was flattered by the strong emotions he had aroused in someone who had never even met him.

Their affair, which began during David’s relationship with Hermione, and continued after he had replaced her with Mary, was
beneficial to David, not just because of Calvin’s record company role, but also because Calvin’s flamboyant image had made its mark among London’s glitterati and he was renowned as one of the best networkers around town—thus he was in a prime position to introduce David to powerful and important people.

According to informed observers, Calvin was madly in love with David and wanted a deeper relationship with him than the casual fling that David had in mind. By now, David was an accomplished sexual juggler, an emotional tightrope walker, living out a duplicitous existence. What with Ken Pitt’s continuing passion for him, Hermione, then Mary, and now Calvin, as well, the pressure on David escalated and finally took its toll on him in the form of debilitating migraine headaches. Yet despite all the convoluted problems he was juggling in his personal life, his creativity remained untarnished, and he continued to be prolific in writing songs.

One night, he called Dana Gillespie and asked if he could come over and sing her his latest song. Naturally, she agreed, and, arriving at her South Kensington cottage with his guitar, he proceeded to strum to the words “Ground control to Major Tom.” After Dana expressed her approval of “Space Oddity,” David telephoned Shirley Wilson, a Bromley girl who had started his fledgling fan club, and played her the song, and she liked it as well. Then David went over to Ken Pitt’s, and, on his twelve-string guitar, played the song for him. And, love-struck or not, Pitt recognized a hit when he heard one, and proceeded to finance “Space Oddity” every step of the way.

Calvin Mark Lee, of course, was on hand, pushing for David, doing all he could to get the song released on Mercury. However, his boss, Lou Reizner, remained unconvinced of David’s talent and of the potential of “Space Oddity.” In truth, his indifference to David and his work was not rooted in professional grounds but in the fact that David had stolen his girlfriend. Her name was Angela Mary Barnett.

A whirlwind of manic energy, with a view of herself so inflated that her bumptiousness knew no bounds, at nineteen, Angie, as she
always called herself, was highly strung, creative, kindhearted, and the daughter of an American colonel, who’d fought the Japanese in World War II but was now running a mill for a mining company in Cyprus, and his wife, Helen.

Educated in America, Angie was expelled from school in Connecticut when it was discovered that she was having an affair with another girl. Nonchalant in the extreme about her expulsion and the reasons behind it, she developed a devil-may-care, attention-seeking sexual persona that would become the primary driving force in her life. After attending finishing school near Montreux, Switzerland, and emerging with show business aspirations, she met entertainer Liberace while traveling on a grand ocean liner, and was dazzled by his glittering sequined jackets and his charisma. She decided that he was the epitome of show business, the world of which she longed to become a part.

In 1966, Angie moved to London to take a secretarial course and then enrolled at Kingston Polytechnic to study economics and marketing. By 1969, she was working at the Nomad Travel Club, a travel agency in Paddington, where she lived above the shop and yearned for bigger and better things. Then fate took a hand and, in the elevator at Leonard’s, the trendy hair salon in Grosvenor Square, she met and caught the fancy of Lou Reizner, the big boss of Mercury Records in London.

In love with life, with her own talent, with her own energy, and, above all, with herself, Angie used Lou’s power and contacts to storm London with a vengeance, bolstered by her masculine, pragmatic, boisterous attitude toward sex. Now openly bisexual, when Lou Reizner introduced her to Calvin Mark Lee, on learning that he, too, was bisexual and was cutting a swathe through both men and women all over town, and not a little because she was curious about what it would be like to go to bed with a Chinese man, Angie embarked on an affair with him.

At the time, she was fully aware that she was merely one of his lovers—as a photo gallery of all his various lovers, male and female,
on display above his bed attested. She was not prone to jealousy and had already acquired a taste for young and beautiful men, so when she flung herself on Calvin’s bed one night and closely examined the assorted photographs of his lovers, inevitably, she fixed on the most beautiful, the most alluring, the most sexual of them all, stark naked from the groin up, and in his entire glory: David Bowie.

David and Calvin were best friends, Calvin initially said, but upon realizing that part of Angie’s charm was her nonjudgmental, nonpossessive attitude to sex, he changed his mind, plunged ahead, and told her the truth about his affair with David, as she listened and filed the information away in her razor-sharp brain, saving it for later. She and Calvin were having fun together, and that was all that counted. And there was always Lou Reizner, powerful, well-connected, wealthy Lou, who remained excited by her brashness, her joie de vivre, her American go-getting energetic attitude to life and to love.

However, once Lou had introduced her to Calvin, he realized that all bets were well and truly off. Worse still, he was forced to stand by while Angie fell instantly, wholly, and completely in love with David. She first saw him onstage at the Roundhouse, when Calvin took her to see him in a Feathers performance. Observing how enthralled Calvin was by David, she at first felt sorry for him, perhaps even then intuiting that, as she would later say, “David was a serial player.”

That night, at the Roundhouse, where The Who topped the bill, marked the night of Angie’s first rock concert. She was overcome with excitement, and, when she looked at David, sheer lust.

“A lean, blond, enigmatic figure in a pastel-striped sweater and mustard-colored sailor’s flares and a voice so compelling that no one could turn a head, David captivated every single member of the audience. Every move, every gyration quickened the pulse. His steel-blue eyes burned with mystery that defied the searching spotlights and his whole performance exuded an eroticism,” she wrote afterward, unknowingly evoking the breathless style of Ken Pitt’s description of his first sight of David.

David was living with Mary and involved with her, but nonetheless, Calvin suggested that Angie join him and David for supper in Chinatown. Aflame with excitement, she threw herself wholeheartedly into playing the role of potential girlfriend to a rising rock star. Determined to make an impression on David, she dressed from head to foot in a masculine fuchsia and purple pantsuit, perhaps as a way of subliminally signaling her bisexuality to him. Aware that David was having sex with Calvin, just as she was, as far as she was concerned, in revealing her bisexuality Angie may well have hoped to forge a unique, if profane bond between them.