Bowie (18 page)

CHANGED

D
avid was a megastar now, and on learning that Tony Defries had registered his company name as MainMan, he naturally assumed that he was the MainMan the company’s name implied.

That same year, David gave his first TV interview since his appearance on BBC TV’s
Tonight
in 1964 to London Weekend Television chat show host Russell Harty. Nervous about subjecting himself to Harty’s questions, David, nonetheless, had his tongue firmly in his cheek when Harty, whom everyone knew was a closet gay, asked him about his bisexuality.

“I’ve known quite a few men,” David allowed, and when Harty probed him on the subject of male groupies, he cracked, “I’ve heard of them, yes. They come on like groupie chicks. And you often find out they’re boys.”

At the same time, when Harty did deign to ask him a serious question, he gave considered answers: “I find that I’m a person who can take on the guises of different people that I meet. I can switch accents within seconds of meeting someone and I take on their accent. I’ve always found that I collect. I’m a collector. I’ve always just seemed to collect personalities. Ideas. I have a hodgepodge philosophy, which is really very minimal,” he said.

At
The Russell Harty Show
, he met American photographer Joe Stevens, whose pictures he had seen and admired in
New Musical Express
.

“He could do impersonations of me, after studying my New Yawkese,” Joe remembered.

In April 1973, David released his new album,
Aladdin Sane
, which he characterized as “Ziggy Goes to America,” and which immediately went gold in Britain. Afterward, although he generally wasn’t happy with having Angie on the tour, he relented and invited her to join him and, with Zowie, they traveled to Japan together.

As an adult, Zowie, now Duncan, would look back and cherish his time in Japan with his mother and father. “I remember one time going to see a sumo wrestling show in Japan when I was a little kid and being amazed. There were a lot of unique things that I got to do and not a lot of people get to experience things like that. And I treasure those memories. But often I’d sit around being bored backstage at a concert,” he said.

During that same trip, David and Angie also took him to Japanese temples and a model village, but his strongest memory would always be of the bustling fish market in Tokyo. It was his last trip with both of his parents, and he would remember it forever.

David had always loved Kabuki, and opted to wear the designs of Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto. Kansai would return the compliment. “He has an unusual face, don’t you think? He’s neither man nor woman. . . . There’s this aura of fantasy which surrounds him,” he said.

In Japan, happy to be with David and with Zowie, who attracted positive attention everywhere, Angie was touched by David’s reaction to being with his son, and watching him, tears welled up in her eyes. “I saw David’s face shining with pride and love for his boy. . . . David could be so kind, so gentle; I loved him so much, I really did,” she said.

She did indeed love David but still didn’t have any intimation that her happy times with him were now all behind her. For while he had once relished her uninhibited sexuality when they were both single, childless, and flouting convention, the moment she had became the mother of his son,
he instantly reverted to tradition and wanted her to stay home and play the role of wife and mother. Instead, she continued to have lovers, both male and female, and while he would, in the future, sometimes join in, he remained emotionally distant and separate from her.

M
eanwhile, Bowie mania continued unabated, and when, on May 12, David performed in front of eighteen thousand fans at Earls Court, the show was halted for fifteen minutes while crazed fans who had stormed the stage battled with security.

By now Ziggy mania had reached such a crescendo that scenes like this were not uncommon, and many a time, fans would succeed in getting so close to David that they grabbed the items of clothing he waved around onstage, and literally hundreds of his shirts were torn to shreds. Even Elton John, ostensibly his rival in the music business, now appeared to be a fan, raving of David, “His stage presence was quite extraordinary. David was so beautiful, so glamorous, so androgynous, and so sexual.”

Mick Jagger made the pilgrimage to David’s Earls Court Show, with Bianca Jagger in tow. David had already paid Mick the compliment of name-checking him in his song “Drive-in Saturday,” referring to “Jagger’s eyes,” and now Mick had reciprocated.

“To me, it was like the passing of the scepter,” Tony Zanetta said. “David had worked for years to become a star, and to have Mick Jagger come to
his
show was an acknowledgment that he had arrived at last.”

A
fter David and the Spiders played Liverpool in June, he threw a birthday party for Trevor Bolder in the penthouse of the hotel where they were all staying. Sisters June and Jean Millington of the rock band Fanny, of which David was a great fan, were among the guests.

Although David was riding high as Ziggy, as always, his gaze was fixed on yet another horizon. “He told me he wanted to get into film. His work ethic was so strong. He had every one of his shows filmed, then watched it afterwards to evaluate his performance,” June Millington said.

David began dating June’s sister Jean, who played bass in Fanny and, at twenty-one, immediately fell madly in love with him. “He was magnificent,” Jean said. “Before we started dating, knowing that he was married, I asked him about what was going on with him and Angie. He said, ‘Angie and I have an agreement, and as long as it isn’t anything that goes beyond a couple of dates . . .’ But, of course, it did with us.” She would remain a part of his life for the next year and a half, and would sing backing vocals on “Fame.”

On July 3, at the Hammersmith Odeon show, simultaneously immortalized by the filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker in front of an audience of thirty-five hundred fans, David made the shocking announcement that “this is the last show we’ll ever do.”

As audience members, many of them dressed as Ziggy clones, wailed and screamed in shock, David did nothing to put them out of their misery, nothing to explain that it was
Ziggy Stardust
whom he was retiring, not David Bowie.

Angie had been filmed before the show, prattling away in an irritatingly artificial upscale British accent, and was neither shocked nor surprised by David’s sudden announcement, as beforehand he had discussed with her his plan to dispense with Ziggy once and for all. However, she still remained unaware that her own departure from David’s life was also imminent. For around the same time, a fan had stolen David’s wedding bracelets, twins to the ones Angie wore, and their chosen substitutes for wedding rings.

“It was symbolic, I thought. Our marriage was pretty much over in all but name,” David said afterward.

A
part from Mick Ronson, who had been forewarned, the Spiders from Mars, whom David had, in effect, sacked in full view of thousands, were devastated.

Bitter and angry, years later, Trevor Bolder told Dylan Jones that he had really bad memories of David “towards the end, when he changed as a person. He was ready, until then, just a regular sort of bloke, he was a nice caring bloke, but the bigger he got, the bigger his head got, and the less important you were to him.”

Mick Ronson would survive the demise of the Spiders from Mars and work with David on
Aladdin Sane
and
Pin Ups
, but then they parted company. Suzi Ronson, Mick’s widow, who is currently in the process of producing a documentary on Mick, said, “Mick was never bitter about David. After Mick stopped playing with him, we had a lot of times when we were stony broke. But Mick didn’t care about money. It was all about the music.”

As for Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey, there was no time for tears or recriminations when, the following evening, MainMan threw an “end of Ziggy Stardust tour” party at London’s Café Royal, which was attended by Barbra Streisand, Ringo Starr, and Mick Jagger, who greeted David by kissing him full on the lips. At that moment, as both Mick and David had intended, Mick Rock was on hand to immortalize the moment.

Like David, Mick Jagger had always known exactly how to work the press, how to excite the crowd, and how to buttress his position as Rock King of the World. Now, however, with David the freshly hatched pretender to his throne, Mick had clearly determined to keep his younger rival close. And he had every reason to feel threatened by David, for by the end of the month, five of David’s albums would be in the UK top 40, and three of those in the top 20, a feat even Jagger had not been able to match.

After that night at the Café Royal, Michael Watts of
Melody Maker
, the same writer to whom David had made his famous “I’m bisexual”
announcement, recalled him raving about Jagger through the entire evening, giving the impression of being utterly enamored by him.

Whether or not David acted on his emotions for Mick is a matter of conjecture. However, while Angie might have been abrasive, histrionic, and self-centered, she is not a liar, and there is a ring of truth to her allegation that she found Mick and David in bed together.

However, flamboyant Roxy Music cover model, singer, and actress Amanda Lear, who was to have an affair with David, spent time with him and Mick together. Adamant that she didn’t believe that David and Mick’s relationship was sexual, she later observed to Mick’s biographer Laura Jackson, “I believe David was madly in love with Jagger during the time I knew him.”

Yet whatever romantic emotions David might have nurtured for Mick, his ambition, as always, overrode everything.

“David particularly copied Mick a lot,” Amanda Lear said. “He was jealous of Jagger’s success and badly wanted to be as big. I know there was a lot of rivalry underneath their friendship as far as David was concerned.”

On one notable occasion David’s rivalry with Mick reared its head in an obvious fashion. While paying a visit to Mick, David discovered that Mick was hiring Belgian designer Guy Peellaert to design his next album cover. David promptly picked up the phone and hired Guy to design the cover for his own
Diamond Dogs
album, as well.

“Mick was silly,” David declared afterward. “I mean, he should never have shown me anything new. He will never do that again. You’ve got to be a bastard in this business.” He added, with a note of triumph, that Mick was now scared to walk into the same room as him with a new idea because “he knows I’ll snatch it.”

And Mick himself afterward allegedly even made the comment, “Be careful of the shoes you wear around David, because next time you see him, he’ll be wearing them, and he’ll be wearing them better than you!”

But despite the fact that Mick and David clearly had each other’s numbers, through the years, they would always retain a strange sort
of connection, auditioning together for the Hollywood buddy movies
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
and
Ishtar
, neither of which they got, and even recently collaborating on a possible autobiographical TV series about two seventies rock stars, which Martin Scorsese may direct.

Away from movies and TV, however, they disagreed on the subject of music. “[Mick] believes in music as music, as a source of uplift, of enjoyment; I see it as a vehicle for ideas, as vocabulary,” David said.

On a social level, they were both very different, with Mick relaxed, and David more distant and remote.

“Mick and David were both very professional. Mick would talk about sport, the current test match, but I never socialized with David,” says BBC producer Jeff Griffin.

L
eaving Ziggy behind him was a relief for David, who generally took five hours to apply his Ziggy Stardust makeup, and an hour each night to take it off.

In the press, there were a great many rumblings that he had been drained psychologically by playing Ziggy 24/7, but the truth was that, above all, he was a Method actor: Ziggy was performance art, and it was eminently clear to him that the time was ripe for him to move on.

Learning that Bryan Ferry was about to record a solo album of covers of oldies,
These Foolish Things
, David quickly followed suit and decided to record his own album of covers of sixties’ oldies,
Pin Ups
. Reportedly, Bryan Ferry was not amused. In the future, they would share a lover, Amanda Lear (but not simultaneously), and, like David, Bryan would also grapple with cocaine. But despite their similarities, and the fact that
Pin Ups
and
These Foolish Things
would hit the charts on exactly the same day, long-term, David would outstrip Bryan Ferry.

On July 9, he traveled to the eighteenth-century Château d’Hérouville, a residential recording studio in the village of Hérouville, near Paris, set to record
Pin Ups
. Photographer Joe Stevens spent
five days there making a record of David’s work in the studio for a photo shoot commissioned by
New Musical Express
. According to Joe, David had hired four French violinists to play on “Sorrow,” and they were ferried to the château by limousine.

The following evening, Joe noticed that David had a big bulge in the back of the pink trousers he was wearing.

“I couldn’t stop wondering what it was—couldn’t stop looking at it,” Joe remembered, “They (the violinists) had been there all night and into the day. They thought they were about to head into the studio to unpack their violins and get started, but Bowie had called the limo service to come back, as he didn’t need the violinists after all.

“He asked them how much they got paid, reached into his back pocket, and the bulge ended up being a massive bankroll of about 150,000 francs” (the equivalent in those days of around $33,000). “He paid ’em out and moved on,” Stevens recalled.

On that same trip, as Joe remembered, “David relished getting lost in Paris after intentionally sending away his limo, and having to fend for himself. In his case, without euros [francs].”