Bowie (31 page)

A shadow fell over their relationship early on during the Glass Spider tour, when he was charged with raping a thirty-year-old makeup artist named Wanda Lee Nichols at Dallas’s Mansion on Turtle Creek Hotel, where he was staying. After two years, the claim was dismissed when Wanda failed a lie detector test and it was also proved that she’d met David at a party at 2
A.M.,
spent the night with him, and then sent him a thank-you note in the morning. However, when he refused to see her the following evening, she pressed charges against him.

With the charges dropped, happy with Melissa, and at the top of his game professionally, around the same time David enthused, “I’m more like I was in 1967 now, say, than I was in 1977. I feel like I am, anyway. I feel as bright and cheerful and as optimistic as I was then—as opposed to feeling as depressed and sort of nihilistic, as I was in the seventies. I feel like I’ve come full circle in that particular way,” he said.

After proposing to Melissa during a romantic trip to Venice, in January 1990 David went so far as to confirm in the press that they were getting married: “I have absolutely no idea when exactly the wedding will be, but we’re engaged, and a wedding is what that usually leads to.”

However, soon after, their relationship ended amid speculation that Melissa hadn’t been strong enough for David, and that in the end, the age difference between them had contributed to the rift. Later, David characterized their relationship as “one of those older men,
younger girl situations where I had the joy of taking her around the world and showing her things. But it became obvious to me that it just wasn’t going to work out as a relationship, and for that she would thank me one of these days.”

Melissa went on to marry David Cassidy’s half brother Patrick.

In the wake of David’s relationship with Melissa, it seemed as though their time together had taught him to value peace and happiness. Now in his forties—and perhaps in part thanks to the perspective that the age difference between him and Melissa had afforded him—David was finally primed to embark on an intimate, lasting relationship with a woman. During the Sound+Vision tour (having overcome his fear of flying somewhat), he took a flight from Madrid. On the plane, guitarist Adrian Belew noticed David leaf through a magazine, then stop at one particular page and comment, “This girl’s interesting.”

Her name was Iman.

But before he met her and his life became utterly transformed, he made a stab at returning to his roots, by becoming one fourth of a band called Tin Machine. And although drummer Hunt Sales cracked, “The thing that makes us different from other bands is that the lead singer’s a millionaire,” David did his utmost to be one of the boys, even insisting that no journalist interview him without the rest of the band present. Far more of a team player now than he had ever been in the early days with the King Bees, the Kon-rads, or any of his other bands, he was now happy to share the spotlight because he no longer had anything to prove.

When Tin Machine played the Brixton Academy in November 1991, in an exercise in nostalgia, David asked the tour’s bus driver to make a detour on the way to the venue and drive down Stansfield Road, Brixton. According to Tin Machine guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, who confided this to biographer Paul Trynka, David began crying and through his tears said, “It’s a miracle. I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how this all happened.”

His spectacular rise to fame and fortune might have been a mystery to him (although it is highly likely that, if pressed, he would have come up with a vast number of valid reasons for his success), but nothing could have prepared him for the romantic fairy tale in which he was about to be cast in the leading role. In retrospect he was to say, “Over the years I’ve become a very buoyant, happy character; 1989 was the period I realized for the first time in my life that I was an exceptionally lucky man. Many things, such as meeting my wife, made me realize that I should bless every damn moment I am alive because I was having, and have, an extraordinary life.”

As it happened, the deus ex machina who set David’s fairy-tale ending in motion was a Los Angeles hairdresser named Teddy Antolin. The date was October 14, 1990; the occasion, a birthday party for Teddy, at which David and Iman were both guests. Later, they would classify their first meeting as a blind date, but there was nothing prosaic about David’s first reaction to Iman.

“I was naming the children the night we met. I knew that she was for me; it was absolutely immediate. I just fell under her spell,” David said, then elaborated, “It was so lucky that we were to meet at that time in our lives, when we were both yearning for each other.”

The very next day, Iman flew out of L.A. bound for a fashion shoot, but when she arrived back, David was on the tarmac, waiting for her. The bisexual, promiscuous, try-anything sex addict who’d go to bed with anyone had miraculously evolved into a romantic, love-struck swain.

David proposed to Iman on October 14, the following year, on a boat floating up the Seine, while in the background, a pianist he had hired just for the evening played romantic standards as David serenaded her with “April in Paris,” the song that would one day be played at their wedding. Iman’s engagement ring dated back to eighteenth-century Florence, and, on a more modern level, as part of consummating their relationship, each of them would submit to having a tattoo. Iman had a Bowie knife tattooed above her ankle, with
the word
David
written on the handle and his name in Arabic lettering tattooed around her belly button. David got a tattoo of a man riding a dolphin on his left calf. A frog rests on the man’s left hand, and there is a Japanese translation of the Serenity Prayer superimposed on both the man and the dolphin. Afterward, David proudly explained that he had the tattoo done “as a confirmation of the love I feel for my wife and my knowledge of the power of life itself.”

And when Iman expressed her feelings about David, they were interchangeable with his for her. “I have found my soul mate with whom sexual compatibility is just the tip of the iceberg. We have so much in common and are totally alike in a lot of things,” she said. Moreover, as she put it, “David has his feminine side. I have a masculine side.”

If her remark is slightly reminiscent of the days when David and Angie swapped gender roles on a regular basis, his marriage and his life with Iman were destined to be diametrically opposed to the marriage and life he had once led with Angie. At separate times, journalist Noreen Taylor Greenslade interviewed Angie and Iman. “Iman and Angie are both strong women. The two women represent both ends of his life: Angie the drug-fueled sixties and seventies, and Iman the New York life,” Taylor Greenslade said.

“Angie was full of angst and bitterness, the woman cast aside. I know that she claims she was seminal in creating him, but I didn’t see anything in her to inspire him. If she had some talent, it would have come out since they divorced, but it hasn’t. Angie is a very destructive part of his life.

“Iman is an intelligent woman, a businesswoman, she’s got a great sense of humor, she’s very wry, and she has irony. She exudes calm,” Taylor Greenslade said.

Poised, self-sufficient, highly intelligent, and startlingly beautiful, Iman was the exact antithesis of Angie. In fact, Angie was a million miles removed from Iman, the second Mrs. Bowie, just as David was now a million miles removed from his other self, David Jones.

 SEVENTEEN 

HEROINE FOR MORE THAN JUST ONE DAY

I
man Mohamed Abdulmajid was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, the product of a great romance between her mother, Marian, and her father, Mohamed. At fourteen, Marian was destined for an arranged marriage with an older man. Instead, she fell madly in love with a seventeen-year-old Arabic teacher from Ethiopia, Mohamed, and together they eloped.

Iman, born in 1955, was originally named Zahara, but her grandfather renamed her Iman, which is a man’s name, and which, Iman believes, makes her the only girl in Somalia named Iman. Being given a man’s name, she says, has had a very specific impact on her life and her psyche. “I am very in touch with my masculine side. I am as independent as Somalia,” she has said, proudly.

After spending the first three years of her life living with her grandmother, she returned home only to find that her mother was jealous of her grandmother, who quickly moved away. From that time on, Iman’s relationship with her mother was fraught. “I have had an adversarial relationship with my mother,” she has said, admitting, “She is powerful and I am, too, and we have locked horns like bulls all my life.”

However, in contrast, she adored her father, who became a diplomat, and who loved to read to her, just as David always has. “He reads to me all the time,” Iman has said of David, “When he reads, he plays all the characters and uses different voices for each one. When he reads to me, it’s like being a little girl again.”

In 1969, when Iman was fourteen and living in Saudi Arabia with her parents, the president of Somalia was assassinated, and Iman and her family fled on foot to Kenya.

Her parents sent her to boarding school, which she hated, and she swore to herself that if she ever had children, she would never subject them to a similar fate. She had been brought up as a Muslim and, when she was very young, had been taken to Mecca. When she grew older, although she no longer prayed, she fasted at Ramadan.

After serving in the Somalian military for two years, she studied political science at the University of Nairobi, spoke five languages, and in between classes waitressed and worked as a translator. When distinguished writer-photographer Peter Beard approached her in the streets of Nairobi in 1975 and asked her if she had ever been photographed, she was outraged.

“I thought,
Oh God, here goes another white man who thinks we’ve never seen a camera
,” she said. On the other hand, as Beard remembered, “Iman was dead anxious to get out of Africa.”

No matter how much she wanted to leave Africa, though, she still drove a hard bargain and would only allow Beard to photograph her if he paid $8,000 for her college tuition—which he did. In Manhattan, he took her to Wilhelmina, one of the top modeling agencies of the day, famous for representing Lauren Hutton and Anjelica Huston, and then called a press conference to introduce her to the fashion establishment. With an eye to media coverage and building Iman’s mythology, Beard claimed that he had met her in the bush, giving enough detail for
Newsweek
to take the ball, run with it, and elaborate by describing her as “a Somali tribeswoman,” and for other publications to go further and describe her as a “nomad.”

Eugenia Sheppard, distinguished fashion columnist for the
New York Post
, heralded Iman’s arrival in America, writing on July 22, 1975, “New York will soon be bowled over by the arrival of a fashion model from Nairobi who will appear wearing an elephant-fetish jacket and a dozen or so gold band necklaces. She is five foot ten and a half, one foot of which, from her photographs, seems to be a miraculous neck.”

Headlines described her as a “Cattle Girl,” and the subtext was that here was a noble savage and that hers was a latter-day Cinderella story. “It was all a fabrication,” Iman admitted afterward. “But I am definitely not the victim of it: I was an accomplice. I knew exactly what was going on.”

All in all, just like David at the start of his career, at the start of hers, Iman was unafraid to spin a good story in order to use the media to promote her. And in Peter Beard she had found a masterly accomplice. “Okay, so we did set up the legend, but it got completely out of hand. The press ended up calling her a goat herder, which was a complete insult. We said she was herding cattle: there’s a big difference,” he said.

In Manhattan, she was immediately photographed by Arthur Elgort for
Vogue
, but as she had never seen the magazine in her life, she was completely unaware as to the significance of the shoot. Moreover, she had never worn makeup or even a pair of high heels before. “Suddenly I was wearing both and standing alone in front of a camera and a barrage of people,” she remembered. “I was like a deer caught in the lights of a car. Afterwards, when I looked at the pictures it didn’t look like me. I saw no trace of the Iman I was.”