Bowie (9 page)

However, Peter and Leni Gillman, who interviewed Ken Pitt, are adamant that Ken was never able to fully consummate his passion for David. Whatever the truth, he was patently in love with David, and, despite his awareness that David swung both ways, he clearly adored the fact that once David moved into his apartment, he habitually walked around stark naked.

“David derived comfort from leaving off his clothes, sometimes sitting cross-legged on the floor encircled by blaring hi-fi speakers,” Ken began somewhat primly in his book, but then went on to salivate, “sometimes loping around the flat, naked, his long, weighty penis swaying from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.”

Far from being shy about his considerable genetic gifts, David happily flaunted his endowment as often as possible, and both onstage
and off would take to wearing the tightest trousers possible in order to display it. As well-respected writer, Lisa Robinson, commented in the magazine
After Dark
, “More unearthly than his face is his crotch, which seems unusually large, almost inhuman.”

In her second autobiography,
Backstage Passes
, Angela Bowie labeled David’s endowment “the Lance of Love,” but as far as he was concerned, love had very little to do with it. In those early years of clawing his way up the ladder to success, his impressive endowment would prove to be one of his most valuable assets when it came to dealing with a series of gay men in the music business, all of whom would be riveted by him and his vast advantage in life. Moreover, he was free and open with his charm and his ability to seduce, whether the target was female or male.

Director Michael Armstrong was a twenty-one-year-old former Royal Academy of Dramatic Art student turned director, about to cast a film,
A Floral Tale
, when he spotted David’s album in a shopwindow and was struck by something about his face on the cover. He immediately purchased the record, decided then and there to work with David, and so contacted Ken Pitt.

“I spent two or three hours with David and Ken, and I fell in love with David. He was absolutely amazing and did a wonderful Elvis impersonation,” Armstrong said.

Although Michael’s film didn’t get made, he arranged for David, on November 19, 1967, to sing at the Stage Ball in aid of the Catholic Stage Guild. The event was held at the Dorchester Hotel. “He was fabulous, but the audience didn’t know what to make of him, so he died onstage. He was so upset that he ran out in tears,” Armstrong remembered.

Nonetheless, there was a positive outcome of David’s Dorchester Hotel performance after all, as celebrity female impersonator Danny La Rue was in the audience, became enthralled with him, and afterward wrote him a long letter proposing a collaboration of some sort. Whether or not David actually ever met Danny La Rue is not
on record, but if he did, there is no doubt whatsoever about David’s approach to Danny.

“David was a terrible flirt in the way in which he dealt with you,” Armstrong said. “He did that with me. He was flirtatious, not in a sexual way, but in a kind of come-on way. It was part of him.

“He always seemed to be playing a cat-and-mouse game with you. He flirted, he really did. I said that he would either be a gigantic star or make a lot of money in the Piccadilly men’s loo,” said Michael Armstrong, who went on to cast David in
The Image
, a highly praised short film that he directed and shot in June 1967.

One of the by-products of David’s appearance in
The Image
was that it helped him get a highly prized equity card, allowing him to work in British theater, although producers weren’t lining up to hire him.

“Ken tried everything to get David’s career going, but nobody seemed to want to know about him, and it was extraordinary to me, as his star quality was so obvious,” Michael Armstrong said.

As Ken struggled to promote David’s career and garner him success at last, he palpitated with an altruistic, almost aesthetic adoration of David, particularly when David serenaded him with his guitar, then spent hours writing reams of lyrics, and, when he had finished, handed them to him, desperate for his opinion. Ken constantly assured David that he was destined to be a star, and together they spent hours contemplating the prospect, imagining it, tasting it.

In anticipation of David’s inevitable ascent to stardom, Ken, eminently experienced publicist that he was, taught him how to handle a press interview so that the journalist interviewing him would warm to him. Although he had faith in David’s good looks, intelligence, natural charm, and innate ability to win over any journalist who interviewed him, Ken nonetheless gave him some tips, such as never to argue with an interviewer, but to tell the interviewer exactly what he or she wanted to hear, and tailor his answers to the type of media outlet the interviewer was representing.

David was intent on absorbing all of Ken’s advice, and hour after hour assiduously eavesdropped on Ken’s telephone calls as Pitt employed all his public relations skills in promoting his charge to the press. In fact, David was so set on grasping every aspect of the PR business that Ken sometimes found him riffling through the letters on his desk, in quest of further knowledge of PR and marketing. By studying a seasoned publicist like Ken Pitt so intently, David was able to build on what he had already learned from his father about public relations. Consequently, when success finally hit, David would become renowned amongst the press for being the most intelligent, polite, and interesting rock star they’d ever interviewed.

Aware that David’s talents were multidimensional, Ken threw himself into finding him work in a variety of creative fields and arranged for him to audition as host of ITV’s children’s program
Play School
, and for the Amsterdam run of the English touring company of the rock musical
Hair
. But as much as he wanted to succeed, David failed to get either part.

Later on, out of financial necessity, in June 1968, he took a part-time job at Legastat, a photocopy shop near London’s High Court, which was primarily patronized by legal professionals working nearby. There, according to owner John Eddowes, David was “a nice, studious guy. We all liked him.”

Along the way, in January 1969, he also appeared singing in a thirty-second TV commercial for LUV ice cream, which was shot by Ridley Scott.

Meanwhile, Ken Pitt never lost faith in him. “I’m going to make him a star,” he announced to London booking agent Harry Dawson, who had said to his face that David would never get anywhere. But if Ken Pitt was David’s biggest champion, he was also his Boswell, immortalizing their year of living together with a combination of perception and adoration, afterward writing of David, “He had a way of sitting in a chair and looking at you with a certain intensity. He managed to look at you as though his eyes were slightly closed, but then
you realized that they were in fact wide open and you got the impression that, as you were talking to him, he was analyzing and dissecting every word you said and forming an opinion in his mind.”

During his time living with Ken, perhaps prompted by his hero worship of Anthony Newley, who performed mime in
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
so successfully, he began to study mime with former stripper, comic, dancer, and mime artist Lindsay Kemp—with whom, unbeknownst to Ken, he also conducted an affair.

In Lindsay Kemp, David had found a kindred spirit.

“I like to do most everything fully. I drink until I’m drunk. I eat until I’m full, frequently until I’m sick. I don’t fancy people, I fall in love with them,” Lindsay once proclaimed.

Lindsay had perfected a performance that successfully combined drag with mime and dance. After Pitt sent Kemp a copy of David’s single, from his album,
David Bowie,
entitled “When I Live My Dream,” Lindsay took to playing it before his show, then on at the Little Theatre Club, off St. Martin’s Lane in London. He invited David to come and see the show. Apart from being riveted by Lindsay’s artistry, David, who was nine years Lindsay’s junior, was highly flattered that Lindsay had introduced the show by playing his song. Naturally, one thing led to another, and soon David was studying dance and mime with Lindsay, and sharing his bed, as well.

After David began his affair with Lindsay, which he kept secret from Ken Pitt, he also launched on a simultaneous affair with Lindsay’s costume and set designer, Natasha Korniloff. And then there was also Lesley Duncan, who introduced him to the music of Jacques Brel and also became his lover.

Scott Walker had been his predecessor in Lesley’s life, and long afterward, David cracked, “I went out with a girl who used to go out with Scott Walker and she preferred him to me. I had to listen to all his songs night after night. She wouldn’t play my music.”

Through all of David’s romantic escapades, Ken Pitt became accustomed to what he termed “David’s walkabouts,” the times when
he disappeared and didn’t offer up any explanations designed to justify his whereabouts. But the fact that David was simultaneously juggling male and female lovers couldn’t have been a complete secret to Pitt, who exhibited a well-developed sense of irony when he arranged for David to audition for director John Schlesinger, then casting
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
. The part? That of Bob Elkin, the handsome bisexual man having concurrent affairs with the character played by Peter Finch and the one played by the young and beautiful Glenda Jackson (whom David would go on to eerily resemble in the video for “Life on Mars?”) and with Peter Finch.

Yet perfect as David might have been for the role, and however uncannily closely the plot of the film mirrored his current sexual relationships and however much the character of Bob Elkin could easily have been based on him, he failed to get the part; Murray Head played it instead. And after Decca refused to renew David’s record contract, news of which reportedly caused him to break down and cry, in despair, he called Stuart Lyons, who ran the Hampstead Country Club, and asked him if he could do a gig there.

“David used to call me all the time,” said Stuart, echoing one of the complaints of music writer Penny Valentine, who reviewed his work with passion but became exasperated when he kept calling her, pushing her to write about him.

“He was very persistent, and more pushy than most artists,” Stuart remembered. “But I did book him at The Country Club.”

Fortunately, David’s father’s contacts also came in handy once more, again in the shape of Leslie Thomas, whose novel
The Virgin Soldiers
was being made into a film at Twickenham Film Studios, and who arranged for David to be cast as an extra in the tiny nonspeaking role of one of the “virgin” soldiers.

“Typecast again,” David cracked at the time.

Playing a larger part in the movie, Scottish actor Alex Norton hung out with David during filming. “We got on very well . . . we both played guitar and had little jam sessions together. David introduced
me to the songs of Jacques Brel. He sang them to me and I was amazed,” Alex remembered.

With his brief movie acting stint behind him, David continued his mime classes, and his relationship with Lindsay, who commented on his progress: “He wasn’t a very good mover, but he was equipped with the essential thing: a desire to move. And I taught him to exteriorize, to reveal his soul. And he had all this inside him, anyway.”

Producer and musician Tony Visconti, who has played a major part in David’s career, right up through today, started working with him around this time and remembered seeing David “go to a mirror just to check a head angle, or he would brush his hair back in a particular way. At the time I thought he was just incredibly vain; later I realized that he was always working on himself, constantly honing his stage persona.”

With Lindsay and Jack Birkett, in December 1967, David appeared in the play
Pierrot in Turquoise
, for which Natasha designed the set and the costumes. Besotted by David, she classified him as “a wonderful lover,” and, to top that, really seemed to understand him.

“He’s not an acquisitive person at all. He doesn’t care for possessions very much,” she said.

At the same time, while Natasha clearly got close enough to David to understand him perfectly, Lindsay still brandished a torch for him, as well, and swooned that he was “an angel.”

David was playing fast and loose with his assorted lovers by resorting to the most rudimentary of schoolboy tricks. As Lindsay (who later allowed that “David had an enormous sexual appetite,”) remembered, “Frequently there were notes from his mother to say he had earache or something, but later on I realized of course that those notes had been faked.”

It was only matter of a time before David’s entire house of amorous cards collapsed completely. On one night while David, Natasha, and Lindsay were on tour together in Whitehaven, as Lindsay recently remembered, “I heard noises through the wall: It was David and Natasha,
who hadn’t known that I was seeing David. After that, he couldn’t go to Natasha’s bed and he certainly couldn’t go to mine, so he spent three nights sleeping in a chair, the tortured martyr.”

In the heat of the moment, Natasha took an overdose of aspirin, and Lindsay, even more dramatically, cut his wrists. Both of them survived, but neither of them forgave David, at least not at the time.

But perhaps if they had read one of his first interviews, the one he gave to Barbara Marilyn Deane of
The Chelsea News
in which he said, flatly, “I do not believe in love in its possessive form,” they might have understood his attitude toward love, sex, and relationships.

Fortunately, in the near future, he would meet the one person in the universe who would understand and share those attitudes completely.

 FIVE