Bowie (2 page)

He is also one of the most polite. His manners are impeccable, even under the most trying of circumstances. Even as far back as October 1972, in Los Angeles, David demonstrated an innate noblesse oblige. Following David’s Santa Monica Civic Auditorium concert, DJ Wolfman Jack threw a party at his home, during which the guest of honor, David, fixed on a girl on the dance floor swirling around sexily with legendary wild man of rock six-foot-four-and-a-half Kim Fowley. When the dance was over, David tentatively approached Kim, and the following dialogue ensued:

“Is she with you?” David inquired politely.

“No,” Kim said.

“Are you in love with her?” David probed.

“No.”

Empowered, he asked Kim if he intended to have sex with the dancing girl. On being assured by Kim that he did not, David put all his cards on the table, as it were, and confessed to him that
he
wanted to have sex with her.

“Can you escort me across the dance floor?” David asked.

Kim complied and watched as David moved closer to the dancing girl.

“My name is David Bowie,” he said quietly, and then added, “Would you like to accompany me to the bathroom?”

She didn’t think twice and followed David immediately. Together, they walked into the bathroom. They locked the door and did not emerge until after quite some time. At that point, David kissed her on the cheek, shook her hand, and said, “Thank you,” and off she went, charmed to the toes by David and his good manners.

So was Kim Fowley.

“Thank you very much” were David’s last words to him that night.

A
nother important guest at David’s wedding was yet another strong woman in the mold of Iman and of Coco Schwab. John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, was an honored guest at the wedding, primarily because David nurtured warm memories of John and, from their first meeting, respected him immensely. That respect was mutual. For although John did once crack, “Meeting David Bowie is always interesting, because you never know which one you are meeting,” John was always fond of David and was wholehearted in his support of his career. So much so that in the very last interview of his life, on the Friday before he was slaughtered, John had dinner at Mr. Chow with BBC broadcaster Andy Peebles, who was also in Manhattan to interview David, then starring on Broadway as John Merrick in
The Elephant Man
.

“John Lennon was very interested that I was talking to David the next day, and said that he thought David was a very talented man, and very gifted. He said that it was amazing that David was doing
The Elephant Man
,” Andy Peebles said.

Playing John Merrick, a man born with a tragic facial deformity, was a triumph for David. Yet at the same time, his decision to play a misfit in his Broadway debut tells a tale about David Bowie, the man. The only child his parents had together, David was born left-handed, which in 1950s England was considered a disgrace, an aberration that had to be corrected at all costs. “At school, I remember very distinctly kids laughing at me because I would draw and write with my left hand,” David said.

His schoolmates yelled that he was “the devil,” simply because he wrote with his left hand. Worse still, “the teacher used to smack my hand to try and make me right-handed,” he said.

The teacher tried her utmost, but in spite of her frequent attempts to force David to favor his right hand over his left, he instinctively resisted and continued to use his left hand regardless. Nonetheless,
the battle had left him scarred and also served to forge iron in his soul. He said, many years later, “It put me outside of others immediately. I didn’t feel the same as the others because of that. . . . So I think it might have been one of those tips of how I was going to evaluate my journey through life: All right, I’m not the same as you motherfuckers, so I’ll be better than you.”

His deep-rooted sense of isolation and drive toward nonconformity were cemented yet further when he was thirteen and was almost robbed of the sight of his left eye, causing him to suffer the medical condition anisocoria, so that he emerged with two markedly different-looking eyes. Not an easy condition for a young boy to cope with, especially in the rough-and-tumble environment of growing up on the fringes of South London. Consequently, David felt like an outcast, a pariah, and his sympathies have always veered toward the underdog, those who walk on the wild side. “It’s a subject I’m fascinated in . . . gigolos, male escorts, male hookers,” he once said.

His fascination with sexual outlaws is natural, given his own history. David, initially celebrated for his androgyny, has always been the ultimate sexual liberator, trumpeting sexual freedom and diversity openly and proudly. He did so first in his songwriting, one of the many facets of his genius (along with performing, painting, and art directing every element of his entire existence), and wrote lyrics dealing with gender-bending in “Rebel, Rebel,” “Suffragette City,” “Queen Bitch,” and “Oh, You Pretty Things.”

On a personal level, by declaring to the press that he was gay at a time when even Elton John was still in the closet, then amending the announcement by saying he was bisexual, by wearing a dress in public, and by being consistently unafraid to cite his various sexual proclivities to interviewers, Bowie smashed through the accepted barrier of what was considered “normal” sexuality and, in the process, freed many a fan from his prison of sexual aloneness.

The truth is that, rather like a latter-day Tom Jones in Henry Fielding’s book of the same name, David has adventured his way from sexual
experience to sexual experience, embracing gay sex, threesomes, group sex, straight sex, then, perhaps most startlingly of all, monogamous marriage.

David’s amorous exploits through the years amount to an extremely multifaceted sexual odyssey, which can be attributed not only to his good looks, his trim, toned, and flexible body, his high-octane libido, his impressive, much-vaunted endowment, his star quality and massive powers of attraction, but also to the fact that Bowie has always been an equal-opportunity lover. Neither age, race, religion, nor the looks of his lovers has ever prevented him from following the siren’s song of his lust, wherever it might lure him.

A brief, kaleidoscopic overview of his conquests: Bette Midler (reportedly an isolated incident in a closet); record executive Calvin Mark Lee;
Playboy
model and actress Bebe Buell; Nina Simone (who inspired him to record “Wild Is the Wind,” which she had recorded first); Charlie Chaplin’s widow, Oona, (twenty-two years his senior); dancer Melissa Hurley (twenty years his junior); singer Ava Cherry; Jean Millington, of the rock band Fanny; and model Winona Williams, whom he invited to live in Berlin with him.

Along the way he paid court to Monique van Vooren (twenty years his senior), had an affair with Dana Gillespie (who was then fourteen to his sixteen) and a dalliance with Cyrinda Foxe (a glamorous Monroe doppelgänger who sported a string of pearls she put to good use during their last sexual encounter), and—in the spirit of his continuing rivalry with Mick Jagger—toyed with Jagger’s onetime girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, backing singer Claudia Lennear (the inspiration for Mick Jagger’s song “Brown Sugar,” and about whom David wrote “Lady Grinning Soul”), and briefly dated Mick’s first wife, Bianca Jagger.

According to David’s ex-wife, Angie, who has hawked a variety of negative stories about David since their divorce, there may also have been more than a moment with Mick Jagger himself. In Angie Bowie’s version of the alleged event, first published in her 1981 autobiography,
Free Spirit
, she returned from a trip to find Mick and David in bed
together, only not sleeping, something which David has taken the rare step of denying. However, David’s girlfriend in the early seventies, Wilhelmina model Winona Williams, also says, “I remember walking in on David and Mick, and tending to think that they had just finished doing something together.”

Other of his conquests—never denied—include Susan Sarandon; Tina Turner; Lulu; Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes; one of the Three Degrees; Ralph Horton, his second manager; and possibly Ken Pitt, his third manager, who was clearly in love with him, although there is no conclusive evidence that their relationship was ever consummated.

Sexually voracious, David conducted simultaneous affairs with dancer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp and Natasha Korniloff, Kemp’s costume designer. He also had a much-publicized affair with transsexual Romy Haag, and affairs with sundry staff employees of MainMan (the company that spearheaded his onslaught on America), consolidating a pattern repeatedly characterized by observers as being David’s way of marking out his territory, and with an array of groupies both male and female, as well. As he put it in a 1997 BBC radio interview, “I was hitting on everybody. I had a wonderfully irresponsible promiscuous time.”

David’s sexual adventures—some partly cocaine-fueled, all ignited by his unbridled appetites and his propensity to cast a wide net, coupled with his unlimited opportunities—typifies his generation’s newfound ability to live out their wildness. His sexuality aside, David Bowie, the real man behind the image, is a wily operator, a hardheaded businessman, knowledgeable about the star-making factory that was the Hollywood studio system, and thus the first rock star to market himself as if he were a movie star. A consummate showman, he is the Barnum & Bailey of his time; a man with a magpie mentality—the living embodiment of T. S. Eliot’s famous line “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”—a cruiser of all aspects of popular culture; a synthesizer of the arts, style, and fashion; and, above all, the Emperor of Rock.

Yet while his unrivaled sense of style and cool may well be the product of an innate iciness within his deepest nature, throughout his life he has also formed abiding relationships with a number of people, and in this, as in his art, he exhibits yet another contradiction. Through it all, to paraphrase the
La Cage aux Folles
anthem “I Am What I Am,” Bowie has definitely always been his own special creation.

B
ut here at David’s wedding to Iman, there isn’t the slightest whiff of the cross-dresser, the chameleon, or the unconventional about him. He is dashing in his Thierry Mugler black tie and tails, with Iman breathtakingly beautiful by his side. The only sign that David isn’t a five-times-married Beverly Hills billionaire banker or a dissolute Russian oligarch pledging his troth in a romantic, opulent wedding ceremony is the diamond stud in his left ear, and his openhearted love for his wife, his joy at their union.

“This for me is so exciting and so invigorating,” David said. “I have such great expectations of our future together. I have never been so happy.”

Twenty-two years after their marriage, David Bowie and Iman are still happy together, their initial conjugal bliss complete with the birth of their daughter, Alexandria, in 2000. Today, David and his family spend most of their time in Manhattan, with David, the consummate husband and father, besotted by both his wife and his daughter, as well as with Duncan (born Zowie) his grown son by his first marriage, who is now an award-winning movie director and very much part of David’s life.

Professionally, he still hasn’t lost his touch. Out of the blue, at 5
A.M.
on the morning of his January 8, 2013, his sixty-sixth birthday without any prior warning, he unleashed “Where Are We Now?” on an unsuspecting public to great acclaim, followed in just two months by his much-feted album, his first in ten years,
The Next Day
. And the
subsequent outpouring of praise for and adoration of David amongst the press, the public, and most of all his peers was unprecedented.

“In the music business there is an aura of great respect around David,” says music publicist Mick Garbutt, who has worked with him sporadically through the years.

David Bowie has climbed so very far, to the heights of fame and fortune, in every field that he has succeeded in conquering: He is a rock god whose story may seem like a moonlit fairy tale but simultaneously echoes the path, the choices, the triumphs, the disasters, and the lives lived by so many of his generation.

And it all began for him so long ago when he was just a kid in South London, where he began the journey that, by dint of his genius, his persistence, and his sheer hard work, would transform him into a global icon whose name, image, music, and artistry would endure forever.

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