Bowie (24 page)

Later on, David hired Marianne to sing on his
1980 Floor Show
, which, confusingly enough, was actually recorded in October 1973, for the NBC TV show
The Midnight Special
, and invited her to the Rolling Stones’ Wembley concert. But conscious that being seen in public with David would give the impression that they were having an affair (which they weren’t at the time), she went to the concert with his entourage and not with him.

However, with her boyfriend, antiques dealer Oliver Musker, Marianne eventually began to spend a lot of time with Angie and David and was drawn into their sexual web.

In her memoirs, she recalled, “One night, we were all a bit drunk at David’s house and David began coming on to me. We went into the corridor. I unzipped his trousers. I was trying to give him a blow job, but David was scared to death of Oliver. Oliver does have this Gestapo officer vibe to him. Absolutely terrified of Oliver David was, and so he couldn’t keep it up.”

Angie, however, told another story and in her second autobiography,
Backstage Passes
, wrote of Marianne at Oakley Street “playing naughty with David, Ava, or Amanda or some combination thereof.”

Marianne was wild and untrammeled, and later on seduced Angie, but in Angie’s eyes that very wildness made Marianne less of a threat to her. But Bianca Jagger, however, cold, remote, elegant, was Mrs. Mick Jagger and to Angie appeared to be a much more serious threat to her marriage.

Worse still for Angie, after Cannes, Bianca and David, who had Zowie with him at the time, vacationed together on the Spanish Riviera and afterward were the guests of Prince Hohenlohe at his
exclusive Marbella Club. Angie did her utmost to ignore David’s burgeoning romance with Bianca and instead carried on carousing at Oakley Street, taking drugs.

A
t the time, David was in the throes of acting out his roles as the Thin White Duke, his final stage persona after Ziggy Stardust, and that of Aladdin Insane, a strange hybrid of a thirties cabaret star and a Rat Packer, which was clearly born out of David’s cocaine paranoia. Suitably pale and emaciated, in his guise of Thin White Duke, David would perform in a foppish white shirt, black waistcoat, and trousers, and exude a combination of icy malaise and lounge-lizard cynicism. With a high degree of self-hatred not unrelated to his mega–drug use, he would label his Thin White Duke “a very Aryan fascist type. A would-be romantic with no emotions at all.”

David had a brief fling with Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, whose description of her moments with David in her book,
Be My Baby
, paints a snapshot of his life in Manhattan during his Thin White Duke years. At a reception after the Isolar tour (aka the Thin White Duke tour, which was in support of the album
Station to Station
, which began in February 1976 and ended in May of the same year) at Madison Square Garden, with a show that Ronnie attended with May Pang, David sent one of his gofers to invite Ronnie to join him at dinner. Afterward, he invited her back to his suite at the Plaza. There, Ronnie was faced with a room full of people, and a coffee table covered in cocaine. Within minutes, she was summoned into David’s vast bedroom, where she found him sitting on the floor, naked, and surrounded by music cassettes.

“One look at this guy and I could see how excited he was to see me. Very . . . Sure enough, we made love right there on the floor, and we didn’t even bother to kick the cassettes out of the way,” Ronnie said.

Afterward, they lay in bed drinking cognac, but the noise from outside the suite was so loud that Ronnie put on her clothes and informed David that she was going home. “Then he asked if he could come along. He said he could do with a little peace and quiet himself, but I got the feeling that wasn’t all he wanted,” Ronnie said.

After David’s limousine ferried them to her apartment on York Avenue, they had just started making love when they heard water running in the kitchen. In shock, Ronnie realized that it was her mother, who had the key to the apartment and must have come by unexpectedly.

“ ‘Your mother?’ Bowie asked. He looked at me like I was joking. But when he saw that I wasn’t, he started laughing out loud. ‘Your mother?’ he said, still chuckling. ‘Oh, Ronnie. That’s so quaint,’ ” Ronnie remembered him saying.

His dalliance with Ronnie was lighthearted, but away from that, his drug taking had increased and his grip on his own sanity was clearly weakening considerably. Looking back, he admitted, “I never fully kicked until the mid-eighties. I’ve an addictive personality, and it took hold of my life. I’m ambivalent about it today. It was an extraordinary thing to have to go through. I certainly wouldn’t want to go through it again, but I’m sort of glad I did.”

Rolling Stone
’s Cameron Crowe interviewed him at various stages at the height of his addiction and described the scene: “[David] pulled down the shades at one point to reveal strange symbols on the curtains of his bedroom and, for a time, he saved his urine in bottles.

“There was an odd belief system at play—a kind of white magic he was exploring,” Crowe wrote.

When David attempted to read Crowe’s article thirty years later, he found that he couldn’t finish it. “It was probably one of the worst periods of my life,” he said. “I was undergoing serious mental problems.”

At the time, his libido was set aflame by his excessive cocaine use, David continued to indulge every aspect of his sexuality. When he
played Vancouver in February 1976, he conducted an orgy with four women and orchestrated the entire evening, positioning the women, including cocktail waitress Cheryl Hise, almost as if he were art-directing a movie.

Now giving every appearance of being resolutely heterosexual, the following month, David was interviewed by Chris Charlesworth for
Melody Maker,
who ended the interview by asking him about his bisexuality.

“Momentary shock. Oh Lord, no. Positively not. That was just a lie,” David said, and disingenuously went on: “They gave me that image so I stuck to it pretty well for a few years. I never adopted that stance. It was given to me. I’ve never done a bisexual action in my life, onstage, record, or anywhere else. I don’t think I even had a gay following much. A few glitter queens, maybe,” he said to Charlesworth, having suddenly morphed into a Dr. Goebbels of pop propaganda.

Clearly unnerved by David’s blatant dissimulation, Chris said nothing. He was past being surprised. David had begun the interview—which he was giving in a suite at Detroit’s Hotel Pontchartrain, where he was dressed in a designer suit, while in the street outside, a Mercedes was on constant call for him—with the words “I’m just doing this tour for the money. I never earned any money before, but this time I’m going to make some. I think I deserve it, don’t you?”

Chris remembered, “He clearly wasn’t broke, but he knew that if he said he was broke it would be the headline of my story. And it was a good headline. David was very wise about how to manipulate the press and create a headline.”

However, his next headline—the one that hit the newspapers on March 22, 1976: “How Bowie Copped It at Pop Rave-Up,” for once, was not engineered by him. As the newspaper reported, he and Iggy Pop and two friends had picked up two women in the bar of the Flagship Americana hotel, where they were staying in Rochester, New York, little knowing that both women were undercover cops.

After David invited them up to his seventh-floor suite, one of the women made a call to waiting police, who raided the room and found half a pound of pot there. David and Iggy and their friends were all arrested and locked up in a jail for the night. In the morning, David posted bail for all of them.

Nothing else came of the incident—an irony, as everyone who knew David at the time agreed: He generally used harder drugs than pot.

“He called me after he was booked and was freaking out. He used to hate pot, so I don’t know why he got booked for using it,” Glenn Hughes said.

After David sailed through the drug bust, untouched by the bad publicity, on May 2 of the same year, he ignited a controversy that finally did tarnish his image, almost irrevocably. Arriving in London on the Orient Express, he was met at Victoria Station by a chauffeur driving his newly acquired black convertible Mercedes, which Coco had only lately purchased on his behalf from the estate of an Iranian prince who had been assassinated.

Fans and photographers crowded the station, desperate for a glimpse of David. After he finally emerged from the train, wearing a black shirt, which, to some, recalled the attire of Oswald Mosley’s followers, once so admired by David’s mother, he proceeded to stand up in the open-topped Mercedes, raise his arm, and make what to some looked like the Nazi salute. Afterward, he flatly denied that he had made it, and insisted that he was merely waving to the crowds.

However,
New Musical Express
ran the photograph under the headline “Heil and Farewell”—and, given that David had once said of Hitler: “His overall objective was very good, and he was a marvelous morale booster. I mean, he was a perfect figurehead.” Although Bryan Ferry, who had always exhibited similarities to David in terms of his style and image, in 2007 also made the mistake of expressing the sentiment that “the way the Nazis staged themselves and presented themselves, my Lord! I’m talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and
the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags,” the outcry against him didn’t match that against David. Although David went on to qualify his remarks regarding Hitler with, “He was a nut and everybody knew he was a nut,” in some quarters, he was damned as a Nazi supporter.

All of which was ironic, given that his best friend, Coco Schwab, was of Jewish origin: Her father had been a legendary photographer of the concentration camps and had liberated his own mother from one of them.

After the Victoria Station debacle, David did all he could to mitigate the damage to his image, and, in an interview with Allan Jones of
Melody Maker
, he swore, “That didn’t happen. THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. I waved. I just
waved
. Believe me. On the life of my child, I waved. And the bastard caught me. In MID-WAVE, man. . . . As if I’d be foolish enough to pull a stunt like that. I died when I saw that photograph.”

David may have sounded devastated by the dent in his image, but not so much so that he allowed his plans to be derailed: He spent the next year or more living in relative seclusion in Berlin.

Long afterward, he defined his motives for moving there: “I needed to completely change my environment and the people I knew. I had a small handful of what one might call normal friends. The rest were dealers. It was extremely unhealthy. Stereotypical rock-and-roll behavior,” he said.

Meanwhile, seven years into her marriage to David, Angie was unaware of his plans. Desperate to save the marriage, she had pinned her hopes on starting a new life with David in Switzerland, where she had gone to school. Using his tax problems as an excuse (and the truth was that had he remained in California, where he was then based, his tax bill would have been sky-high), she procured a seven-bedroom chalet near Blonay, overlooking Lake Geneva, where their nearest neighbors in Vevey were Charlie Chaplin, his wife, Oona, and their brood of eight children. But though the house, named Clos de
Mésanges, was idyllic, and though Angie set about furnishing it exquisitely, David hated it on sight.

Nonetheless, still with Coco, his ever-present companion/nanny, constantly by his side, he spent some time there, while Angie, dispirited, went back to London, where she carried on her whirlwind drug-driven party existence without him, becoming more strung out.

Zowie, meanwhile, was primarily brought up by his nanny, Marion Skene, who was more of a parent to Zowie than David and Angie were. David did attempt to father Zowie in the best way in which he knew how, instilling in him a love of movies. When Zowie was seven, David would screen
The Seahawk
, a pirate movie starring Errol Flynn, for him. And when the boy was eight, David showed him a video of
A Clockwork Orange
, the movie that had played such a seminal part in his own career, influencing as it had, his creation Ziggy Stardust.

“I remember he was sitting with me on the sofa with his arm around me, explaining everything,” Zowie said, recalling with warmth and nostalgia the closeness he and his father had.

Stifled by the arid beauty of Switzerland, David, though he loved walking by Lake Geneva, painting, reading, and working on sculptures, found both the countryside and the house too serene to hold his attention. Berlin beckoned him partly because he had read Christopher Isherwood’s
Goodbye to Berlin
(which was adapted into the movie
Cabaret
); it was set in the Weimar Republic years running up to World War II, featuring louche songbird Sally Bowles. Isherwood had painted the Berlin of those years as a decadent, lush city, which Toulouse-Lautrec might well have immortalized, just as he did Paris. Unhappily for David, though, as Isherwood informed him face-to-face when they finally met: “Young Bowie, people forget that I’m a very good fiction writer.”

The truth was that Berlin in the late seventies, far from being glamorous and debauched as depicted by Isherwood in his novel, was a grim, impoverished city, torn asunder in the Second World War, and
dominated by the Wall and the heavy Russian presence ruling over half of it.

But David didn’t care. “I went to Berlin to find an environment unlike California, that dreadful, parasitic mire. It seemed foreign and alien to anything I’d been through. Rough and tough, not a sweet life.

“I was just doing things like shopping and walking around. Anything that had to do with survival and nothing to do with rock and roll.”

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