Bowie (7 page)

The following year, when David and the Manish Boys were scheduled to appear on the BBC’s
Gadzooks! It’s All Happening
, producer Barrie Langford took one look at David and demanded he cut his hair. Seizing the moment for its PR value, David flatly refused, and Leslie Conn promptly arranged for a few fans to demonstrate outside the BBC Television Centre, waving banners that read “Be Fair to Long Hair.”

Although the protest didn’t capture the interest of the nation, the BBC relented and booked David and the Manish Boys on the condition that if there were any protests from the public, the group’s fee for the show would be donated to charity. None materialized. And that was the end of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. But it had served its purpose by putting David in the spotlight once more, and Leslie Conn, at least, felt that he was fulfilling his obligations to him.

In dealing with David, he had always done everything by the book, driving to Plaistow Grove in his Jaguar to meet with Peggy and John before signing David to his management contract. There, he found Peggy to be “narcissistic”; in contrast, he judged John Jones to be a concerned father, and a conservative businessman.

Toward the end of 1964, in an act billed as Davie Jones and the Manish Boys, David made his first appearance at the fabled Marquee Club in Soho, London. Clad in a Robin Hood–style shirt with billowing sleeves, jeans, knee-length fringed suede boots, his hair long and flowing, he was handsome and dashing, and instantly captivated fourteen-year-old Dana Gillespie, who was in the audience.

“I was a very forward fourteen-year-old girl,” Dana remembered. “David looked great, and after the show, when I was in the bathroom, brushing my hair, which was waist-length and dyed blond, he came up behind me, took the brush from my hand, and carried on brushing it. And when he asked if he could take me home that night, I said that he absolutely could. So I took him home to my house. I had a single bed and I guess we fiddled about. It was exploration sex.

“In the morning, I introduced him to my father. Afterwards, he said he didn’t know whether David was a man or a woman until he actually opened his mouth.”

From then on, whenever possible, David would pick Dana up from school.

“It’s often said that he carried my ballet shoes, which sounds kind of romantic, but he actually did sometimes, if I was carrying a whole load of things,” Dana said, then recalled her first visit to David’s parents’ home. “I’ll never forget it. His parents were sitting and staring at a black-and-white TV. We sat down and had tuna-fish sandwiches. It was a cozy little room, but there didn’t seem to be any love in the house, and I realized that David didn’t love his parents like I loved mine,” Dana said. “It was a very depressing experience. When his parents went out of the room, David turned to me and said, ‘Whatever it takes, I am going to get out of here.’ ”

Unaware of David’s deep discontent, his father, concerned about his son’s lack of success in the music business and his struggles to keep afloat financially, remained the archetypical stage father, watched over David’s career diligently, dealt with all his correspondence, and even handled his bank account. John Jones was tirelessly supportive of David’s career and resolutely uncritical of him, to his face, at least. Forever afterward, on a professional level, David would automatically expect the same unconditional love and support from anyone who worked closely with him.

Even though David was still living at home with his parents in Bromley, he was broke and Leslie Conn did his best to help him get
by, even giving him a job repainting his Denmark Street offices, along with his other protégé, fellow musician Marc Bolan. Bolan, then still Feld, was almost seventeen; David, then still David Jones, was almost eighteen; and both of them were struggling musicians, determined to make it to the top.

“They were very similar, in so many ways. They could have been brothers,” Keith Altham, who was publicist for both of them at different times through the years, said.

“Both Marc and I were out of work, and we met when we poured into the manager’s office to whitewash the walls,” David remembered, adding, “So there’s me and this mod whitewashing the office and he goes, ‘Where’d you get your shirt?’ ”

And so. almost immediately, they launched into a conversation about clothes and then and there bonded. Both David and Marc were good-looking and exuded charm, ambition, but from the first, there was a certain amount of rivalry between them, as each began to outdo the other with boasts of the golden professional future he assumed was in front of him. “I’m gonna be a singer and I’m gonna be so big you’re not gonna believe it, man,” Marc said.

David attempted to counter Marc’s boasts, but Marc wasn’t about to yield to him, either in ambition or in talent.

As Brooklyn-born producer Tony Visconti, who had originally been an acclaimed guitarist, then moved to London in 1968 and went on to produce both David and Marc, put it years later, “Marc was in rivalry with everybody. He simply couldn’t stand attention going in anyone else’s direction. He was a total megalomaniac, God bless him. David, on the other hand, is a very gregarious, open-minded person, and apart from a normal, healthy type of rivalry, he was never obsessed with Bolan.”

In the first innocent few days after their initial meeting, David and Marc painted Leslie’s office together, taking breaks in a nearby café, La Gioconda, in bustling Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley, a street occupied almost exclusively by music publishers, agents, record
studios, and a hangout for musicians, unemployed or otherwise. The street was not only the epicenter of Britain’s music business but was adjoined Soho, the city’s red-light district, which lent the area a patina of illicit sin, reinforced by a plethora of strip clubs and sex-magazine emporiums. Nonetheless, the music business dominated, with Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, the 100 Club, 2i’s Coffee Bar, and, of course, the Marquee, a musician’s Mecca.

Four record labels ruled the roost in Britain at that time: EMI, Decca, Philips, and Pye. Beatlemania was rife, with the Beatles managed by Brian Epstein, the prototype for London’s gay music managers like Kit Lambert, who managed the Who. That David was so determined to make it as a rock star in the London of those days was in part due to the Cinderella aura of the music business in that era. For while every American boy grew up believing he could one day become president and every American girl that she could make it as a Hollywood star, the British equivalent was to dream of becoming a rock star.

On the threshold of Swinging London, as
Time
termed it—when youth, fashion, photography, and pop converged in a highly colored Niagara of possibility, Carnaby Street was the heartbeat of the sixties scene, dominated by the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and the Kinks, by Twiggy, David Bailey, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton, Vidal Sassoon, and Barbara Hulanicki, founder of the iconic Biba store, where David would eventually shop—becoming a rock star appeared to be an attainable dream for David and for Marc.

In May 1965, now jaded with the Manish Boys, when David heard through the grapevine that the rock-and-roll band the Lower Third was looking for a new member, he auditioned for them and beat Steve Marriott, (who went on to front the Small Faces) and was invited to join the group, which consisted of Dennis Taylor on lead guitar, bass guitarist Graham Evans, and, soon after David joined as lead singer, drummer Phil Lancaster.

Before Phil was hired, David was enlisted to vet him over coffee at La Gioconda. Phil remembered his first impression of David: “He was
quite striking because he was just skin and bones. He had shoulder-length hair, which had been bleached but had grown out. We had a good chat over a cup of tea. We talked about music. He even did a Bob Dylan impression for me—and it was very good.”

David warmed to Phil immediately and told him he’d made the band without even having to audition for it. For the next seven months, David and Phil worked together closely.

“The Lower Third had this ambulance we used to drive around in, which was great. It still had the bell and sign. Me and Dave used to sit in the back together and think of wacky ideas to get us noticed more,” Phil said. “David suddenly said: ‘How about wearing makeup?’ I thought he meant clown makeup so I was well up for it. But when I shouted it over to Graham in the front of the ambulance he wasn’t impressed. He told us, ‘Not fucking likely.’ ”

Despite what would soon transpire, Phil had no doubts whatsoever that David was heterosexual. “We were playing in a club, and a waitress offered us a night’s accommodation. I was in the same room as David and the waitress, who were in bed together. I knew from the noises that he was having sex with her. He wasn’t shy about doing it in the same room as me,” Phil Lancaster said.

After David and the Lower Third secured a record deal with Parlophone and recorded two tracks, “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” and “Baby Loves That Way,” David had a chance meeting with Ralph Horton, a former booker for the King Agency, then a roadie/driver for the Moody Blues. Ralph pitched himself to David as a manager. Impressed, David, in the kindest way possible, broke the news to the long-suffering Leslie Conn that he was leaving him and hiring another manager instead.

Aware that he had probably taken David as far as he could, Conn graciously stepped aside, and in July 1965, Ralph Horton took over as the manager of the Lower Third. In his late twenties, Horton was relatively open about being gay—a courageous stance in the midsixties, when the Sexual Offences Act, which decreed homosexuality to
be a criminal offense, was still the law in Britain, and would only be repealed in July 1967.

“Ralph was babyish, chubby-cheeked, and borrowed money so he could spend it on promoting David and the band,” said Kenny Bell, who worked for the Terry King Agency and shared an apartment with Ralph Horton in Warwick Square.

At first, as he booked the Lower Third for nationwide gigs, Horton’s sexuality didn’t come into play in terms of his style of management. But after a few months, it became clear that his interest in David was more than professional.

“Dave became a little more aloof and would go off with Ralph quite a lot. He stopped helping us load up the gear onto the van to and from gigs,” Phil Lancaster remembered, adding, “It had always been a joint effort, but now he’d just sit down and watch. Instead of coming back from gigs in the ambulance with us, he would go back with Ralph in his Jaguar.”

“Ralph Horton was uptight and tense. He was probably in love with David. He fancied David,” said John Hutchinson, who played with David in the Buzz, the band he formed after the Lower Third.

“David certainly slept with Ralph. He often stayed over at Warwick Square, where there were only two bedrooms. I slept in one and Ralph and David slept in the other one,” Kenny Bell said.

Clearly enthralled by David, Ralph openly favored him over the rest of the band, which, at the end of September 1965, he would rename Davie Jones and the Lower Third, in the process teaching David exactly how far his own sexual charisma could carry him in the London music scene.

As Derek Boyes, who went on to join the Buzz with David, put it, “In the business, agents, impresarios, ninety-nine percent of them were bent anyway. There was no point in getting uptight.”

David had never been uptight about sex, and now he was about to exploit his lack of inhibition to his full advantage. After all, he had spent more than three years fighting to make it in the business, but to
no avail. Ralph Horton’s passion for him had finally shown him the way.

T
oward the end of the summer of 1965, Ralph Horton, then managing seventeen-year-old Davie Jones (as David was then calling himself), was broke. Desperate for financing, he set about searching for a business partner to help him manage Davie Jones and the Lower Third. Consequently, Ralph invited rock manager Simon Napier-Bell for a meeting at his home/office, a rented basement apartment at 79A Warwick Square, intending to offer him a fifty-fifty deal if he agreed to become Davie Jones and the Lower Third’s comanager.

At the time, Napier-Bell, then managing the Yardbirds, and who went on to manage Marc Bolan and, much later on, Wham!, was far more of an established manager than Ralph Horton. Hence Ralph’s invitation to Simon, with whom he wanted to split his representation of David, in exchange for an injection of cash.

Today, Simon Napier-Bell still remembers every detail of what happened when he arrived at Horton’s apartment to find him and David waiting there for him. “Davie sat demurely in a corner,” Simon remembered. Then, without so much as introducing Simon to David, Ralph took him aside and, according to Napier-Bell, without making any bones about it, put forward the following proposition to him: “[Horton] said that if I were to agree to come in on the management, he would allow me to have sex with his young protégé.

“I had no idea whether [David] was in on the proposition or not,” Napier-Bell said afterward.

Given that David was in the room at the time Ralph Horton made the proposal to Napier-Bell, it seems highly unlikely that Horton would have offered him sex with David unless David had agreed in advance to honor that offer. It would seem that, at seventeen, David Jones had traveled inordinately far from the tousle-haired, winsome,
saxophone-playing thirteen-year-old boy who was already his school’s Casanova, and whose desires had in those early days appeared to be directed exclusively at girls, and only girls.

Then again, according to Alan Dodds, who was the guitarist in the Kon-rads and wrote the lyrics to “I Never Dreamed,” when David was sixteen, “he was telling everyone that he was bisexual.”

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