Bowie (8 page)

SEXUAL LABYRINTH

A
fter Simon Napier-Bell rejected Ralph Horton’s proposal, Horton turned to another manager for help. His name was Ken Pitt; he was in his early forties and had worked as a publicist for Frank Sinatra, and with Liberace, Vic Damone, Mel Tormé, and none other than Anthony Newley, David’s then idol.

But at that stage, Pitt simply wasn’t interested in signing any clients and refused Horton’s request. As a parting shot, he advised Horton to change David’s name, as another Davy Jones, an actor who had already won acclaim as the Artful Dodger in the theatrical production of Lionel Bart’s
Oliver
, and who’d found fame as one of the Monkees, was doing extremely well, and he felt that there could be confusion between them.

Ralph Horton took Ken’s suggestion to heart. “He came into the Roebuck Pub on Tottenham Court Road (where we always rehearsed) one night and told David that he should change his name and we should change ours, and that we all should go away and come up with a new name,” Phil Lancaster said. “David went away and the next morning came back and told us his new name was ‘Bowie,’ but didn’t say anything about it being do with a knife.”

Given that David still lived at home, it was certain that he had consulted his father, who micromanaged every detail of his career, about the choice of his new name. And, as it happened, at Dr. Barnardo’s, where John had worked for many years, one of the most important supporters was named Norman Bowie, a war hero who’d won the Burma Star and was a well-established businessman as a trustee of the charity and later became head of Barnardo’s council. So it’s highly likely that David’s father may well have suggested the name Bowie and that David, who implicitly trusted his father’s instincts, instantly took up his suggestion.

“I came home to Warwick Square early one afternoon, and David and Ralph were in the living room,” Kenny Bell recalled. “And David said, ‘Oh, I’ve got myself a new name.’ I said, ‘What is it, then?’ And David said, ‘I’m calling myself ‘David Bowie.’ So I said, ‘That’s a stupid name. That’s a knife. The Bowie knife. It’s American.’

“David didn’t say ‘I know.’ He just shrugged and said, ‘Well, I’m going to call myself ‘Bowie’ anyway. . . .’ I was the one who, after he’d changed his name to Bowie, first told David about the Bowie knife,” Kenny Bell said.

Naturally, it would follow that either Ralph or Ken Pitt or David’s father would likely seize on Kenny Bell’s explanation of the name Bowie, and decide that claiming David’s last name had been inspired by a knife, rather than by an executive of a children’s charity, would play far better in the media.

So David soldiered on under the name Bowie, and “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” a rock song that he wrote, then recorded with the Lower Third, was released. But after Ralph Horton refused to pay the other members of the band for a gig, telling them that he’d had to recoup his expenses, all the Lower Third, except for David, refused to play anymore. The end result was that the Lower Third, who were also annoyed that David had higher billing than they did, finally split up in January 1966.

Almost immediately afterward, David formed a new group, the
Buzz, along with Derek “Dek” Fearnley, Derek Boyes, and John Eager. At Ralph Horton’s suggestion, they were all transformed into new-look mods, and although the change in their image was radical, there was very little tension between Ralph and the members of the Buzz.

“Ralph could be very funny, the way he took people off and minced around,” Boyes recalled before he passed away in 2011.

Ralph was less than amused, or amusing, though, when he learned of David’s romantic involvement with Dana Gillespie, whose career David was trying to help by teaching her guitar chords and arranging for her to make a guest appearance on the TV show
Ready Steady Go!

Using an alibi that would pay dividends for David in the future, whenever he intended to spend time with Dana, he told Ralph that he was going to visit his parents in Bromley. When Ralph discovered the truth, he hit the roof, claiming that Dana was a bad influence on him, but David carried on seeing her regardless.

At the same time, now that David was in full flower of his good looks, according to Leni and Peter Gillman’s seminal 1986 book,
Alias David Bowie
, he had become a magnet for gay men and was surrounded by a coterie of male admirers, all of whom clustered around him in Horton’s basement. “One suitor was an actor who plied David with barley wines at the Marquis of Westminster in Warwick Square; another was a journalist who managed to insert regular items about David in
Melody Maker
; a third was a commercial radio disc-jockey who played his records with embarrassing frequency,” Leni and Peter Gillman said.

Lionel Bart, creator of
Oliver
and a musical giant, was also charmed by David, sending him congratulations on his record releases, making it clear that he was firmly on his team, and appearing so regularly in his company that Paul Trynka, author of
Starman
, described Bart as being often seen “with a rent boy in tow, or snuggled up to David.”

Whether or not David made himself sexually available to Lionel so that he could take advantage of having such a famous gay man as his admirer, or how far he allowed Lionel to go with him sexually, is
not on record. Clearly, though, the two were good friends, so much so that in April 1973, when Lionel was in a car accident, according to Bart’s biographer, Caroline Stafford, David went to visit him in the hospital.

“David was exactly Lionel’s type. He was beautiful and not too young,” Stafford said.

But if David had traded on the rich, famous, and influential Lionel Bart’s inclination toward beautiful boys in the music business, he may not have been totally alone. For none other than Mick Jagger also seems to have formed a close relationship with Bart on the way to rock superstardom. As Mick’s biographer Philip Norman confirmed, in 1965, when Mick found himself homeless for a while, Lionel invited him to stay at his apartment in Bryanston Mews, Marylebone, and Chrissie Shrimpton, Mick’s then girlfriend, moved in with him.

“Chrissie was more worried by other new friends that Mick was attracting,” Philip Norman wrote, adding, “Lionel Bart, whose roof they now shared, was ostentatiously gay and, despite the draconian antihomosexuality laws, made no secret of his florid and expansive sex life. Prominently displayed throughout the flat were tubes of KY lubricating jelly, which Chrissie in her innocence mistook for hair gel.”

According to Norman, Bart was also extremely close to Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who had been jailed for what were then known as “homosexual offenses,” but was released after a year. As Chrissie Shrimpton confided to Norman, “He was always trying to persuade Mick to go and stay at his country house. I objected to all these people being after my boyfriend. . . .”

Whatever the cause, as Norman put it, “Mick was constantly simmering. It was not only the habit of addressing males and females alike as ‘darling’ or ‘dear’ and his fascination with celebrity mega-queens like Lionel Bart.”

Like Mick, David was adept at playing London’s gay elite. Peter and Leni Gillman, who interviewed Dek Fearnley before he passed away in 2008, tell of a night when a bemused Horton received a call
informing him that he was about to receive a visit from an “international recording star.” Whereupon a chauffeur appeared at the door, made the announcement, “Miss Garland is here,” and there was David, in full drag, wearing makeup and a ball gown.

But though Horton and Bowie shared a sense of fun, as well as a passion for show business, and though he was dedicated to David, Ralph was small-time, and David knew it. Fortunately for David, both his luck and his management were about to change. On the afternoon of Sunday, April 17, 1966, Ken Pitt attended the second of David’s “Bowie Showboat” shows at the Marquee and virtually fell in love with him at first sight.

His book,
The Pitt Report
, paints a portrait of David so homoerotic in quality that there can be little doubt about the true nature of Ken’s feelings for him. “I could see that he was wearing a biscuit-colored, hand-knitted sweater, round-necked and buttoned at one shoulder, its skin-tightness accentuating his slim frame. . . . He oozed confidence and was in total command of himself, his band and his audience. His burgeoning charisma was undeniable,” Ken Pitt wrote.

Ken was undoubtedly smitten and, without any further preamble, made a deal with Ralph Horton to manage David jointly with him.

Though David was now catnip for a variety of powerful, often older, gay men, his allure for women hadn’t diminished a jot. One afternoon, over coffee at La Gioconda, David chanced to meet the then notorious Mandy Rice-Davies, the glittering blonde who, with Christine Keeler, had been at the heart of the John Profumo/Stephen Ward scandal, which two years before had brought down the Conservative government.

“I thought he was really interesting and good-looking, and his eyes fascinated me. I think he was quite sexy, and if I hadn’t been married at the time, I may well have fallen for David,” Rice-Davies says today.

At La Gioconda to scout for an entertainer to perform at Mandy’s, her newly opened nightclub in Tel Aviv, Mandy invited David to lunch and promptly offered him the job of singing in the club. “He was very
keen on going to Israel,” Mandy remembered. “He was a very self-confident young man. And he asked me a question I’ve never forgotten: ‘What is the best thing about being famous?’ I said, ‘You never have to buy your own lunch.’ ”

Mandy came back to the Gioconda two weeks later, ready to make the arrangements for David’s Tel Aviv gig, only for him to tell her really apologetically, “I’d love to come, but I can’t. I’ve got a recording contract.”

Now jointly managed by Ken Pitt and Ralph Horton, David had also formed a friendship with singer-songwriter Jonathan King, who had a major hit with “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” when he was eighteen years old, and also had a regular column in
Disc and Music Echo.

“I loved ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me,’ and gave it the whole lead of my column and said it was fabulous,” Jonathan recalled. “That thrilled David, and he immediately got in touch with me and came round to my place. He was desperately trying to be a star, but he wasn’t. I thought he was very sweet, and I think he fancied me. But I didn’t fancy him because of his different colored eyes.

“It never got to a point where I rejected him, I just had the vibes that if I had wanted to . . . David was bisexual, but was predominantly heterosexual. Looking back now, I’ve got the feeling that his gay experiences were part of wanting to get on,” Jonathan said.

By the end of the year, David had ended his relationship with the Buzz and, along the way, had signed with Deram Records, a subsidiary of Decca, to cut “Rubber Band”/“The London Boys,” then, utterly inexplicably, “The Laughing Gnome.” The last was a novelty song that he wrote after performing in a venue in Eastbourne on the south coast of England and, afterward, going back to the house of five-foot-one Malcolm Diplock, where the pair spent the evening laughing uproariously together. Hence, “The Laughing Gnome.”

The record was quirky and would haunt David throughout his career, much to his distaste. As British DJ Tony Blackburn revealed to
Dylan Jones, author of
When Ziggy Played Guitar
, he once told David he loved “The Laughing Gnome.” “And he turned and very gently said, ‘Oh, that’s not me,’ and walked off,” Tony Blackburn said.

But despite David’s disdain for “The Laughing Gnome,” one of the most fascinating elements of the recording is that on it, David’s voice is almost an exact voiceprint of Anthony Newley’s. His fascination with Newley was born when, at the impressionable age of fourteen, he saw him onstage in
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
, which Newley wrote and performed. A singer, actor, songwriter, mime, and dancer, Newley was the prototype of the star David longed to become. “I was Tony Newley for a year,” he once admitted.

However, David being David, he flew too close to the flame by aping Newley’s voice with such unerring accuracy that, at the time, Newley was said to be genuinely annoyed by his uncanny imitation of him, particularly in June 1967, when David’s first solo album,
David Bowie
(for which he wrote and sang all fourteen tracks) was released, still with a big dollop of Newley about it.

“I think Bowie liked that irreverent thing, and his delivery was very similar to mine, that Cockney thing,” Newley observed long afterward, then hastily added, “but then he went on to become madly elegant and very, very original.”

Ten days after David’s first album was released, he made the monumental decision to move out of his parents’ home and into Ken Pitt’s book-filled fourth-floor apartment on London’s elegant Manchester Square. There, David was to be exposed to one of the seminal musical influences of his career: the Velvet Underground. It all began when Pitt went to America in November 1966 and returned with a demo of the Velvet Underground’s first album and gave it to David, telling him it was hideous but probably the kind of thing David would like.

“I adored it,” David said, “and—this is a funny thing—started doing a couple of the songs from the album onstage. So I was actually doing Velvet Underground covers before the album came out.”

By now, Ralph Horton was completely out of the picture, and Ken Pitt was managing David on his own—and acting as his cultural mentor, as well, although David’s knowledge of literature was already well developed. In fact, the first time David walked into Ken’s apartment, he headed straight to the bookcase and ran his fingers over the spines of the works of Oscar Wilde and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, thus demonstrating that he was already well acquainted with both authors. Pitt was instantly impressed by his erudition.

“He was a great lodger, never a problem, except for the joss sticks,” Ken Pitt said, doing his best to obscure the truth about the full extent of his relationship with David.

For David was far more than a lodger, far more than a client to him. Journalist George Tremlett, author of
David Bowie: Living on the Brink
, whose father was one of Ken Pitt’s friends for many years, observed David and Ken together at the Manchester Square apartment. “They probably did have a sexual relationship—but one that was never as important to Bowie as it was to Pitt,” George said, adding, “I believe Pitt genuinely loved him, but Bowie was always a chancer—and within days of him moving into the apartment Pitt was left in no doubt that Bowie would happily sleep with women as well.”