Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  David’s rock ’n’ roll lifestyle would ultimately be the undoing of his relationship with Hermione. He didn’t know any other way to live and pursued affairs and kept hours that she eventually could no longer abide, and soon there was tension in hippie heaven. “I was totally unfaithful and couldn’t for the life of me keep it zipped,” he confessed to Mojo in 2002. “I’m sure we would have lasted a good long time if I’d been a good boy.”

  “Hermione was in and out of David’s life so fast that it is not surprising that biographers have little to write about. Also, unlike most ex-wives and -girlfriends of celebrities, she was well bred and had the intelligence to drift away into the obscurity of her own private life,” Pitt writes to me. “I liked her very much and hoped the romance would blossom and that she would marry David, but it was not to be.”

  Among those with whom David may have dallied at this time was an Asian American named Calvin Mark Lee, who seemed happy to be found and to speak about his affair with Bowie when I contacted him. Lee is now seventy-two. He lives alone in Los Angeles in a small apartment near MacArthur Park surrounded by TVs. When I interviewed him for this book in the summer of 2008, he would watch each screen as he spoke and occasionally comment on it. David Bowie himself watched a wall of television sets while portraying the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in his proper film debut, 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. “Get out of my mind!” he ended up screaming. Lee is a molecular chemist with over thirty published papers to his credit, and his mind, I think, is porous enough, or large enough, to handle it. A little scary even. Our first interview lasted four hours. We spoke of David Bowie for twenty minutes.

  Before he agreed to speak with me, Calvin asked if I would e-mail him a photo of myself—not for any prurient reasons. He is more what I would call a hybrid of super-humanist and aesthetic snob. He loves and has unmatched enthusiasm for all people, as long as they are beautiful, talented and intelligent. “I believe in beautiful, creative and intelligent people. I believe in them having not just one of those attributes but all three at the same time. That’s my criteria … beauty, creativity and intelligence. The first thing in taking a photo is the beauty part. If they don’t fulfill the first criteria I don’t go on any further. If you’re a musician you’re creative, but I would never take a picture of Elton John. And I’ve met Elton John.”

  Lee came from a family of Chinese American intellectuals from San Francisco. He studied at Yale before accepting a grant to attend Chelsea College in London. He arrived on May 30, 1963 (a Thursday; he made me look it up). “They were filming a movie around Manresa Road at the time. The Collector with Samantha Eggar,” he tells me. Bored with his fellow intellectuals (who embodied only the intelligence part of his threefold criteria), he began hanging out in the burgeoning pop scene, catching early London sets by the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds (Lee is in the audience during the famous nightclub scene in Blow Up). With his Minox camera, he became something of a collector of his own, taking photos of people as a means to connect with those who met his standards. “Who are the most beautiful, creative and intelligent people? They were artists and musicians,” Lee would tell me.

  Lee has a flair for suspense building in his speech. He will say things like “There was this one group of four people and they went by the name … the Beatles.” Or “That band was a band with a three-letter name, and that was W-H-O. The Who.”

  Lee spent his days in London living on the Mercury Records expense account, taking artists to sumptuous Chinese meals at Mr. Chow’s in posh Knightsbridge and basking in the glow of their beauty, creativity and intelligence. “Being paid to wine and dine beautiful, creative and intelligent people—what more of a job could anyone want? I remember taking Jerry Lee Lewis and his companion. I had to explain to him what each item was. What the ingredients were on the menu.”

  Others in London at the time might have known the ubiquitous Lee simply as the guy with the third-eye jewel on his forehead. He was locally famous for the plastic prism he affixed there, framed by his long, jet-black hair to great theatrical effect. “They were what I call a love jewel,” he says. “That’s the love emanating from me to you.” David would incorporate the love jewel into his late-period Ziggy Stardust costume in 1973.

  It’s possible that Lee met and photographed Bowie before Bowie even started living with Hermione Farthingale. Kenneth Pitt claims to have received a fan letter from Lee addressed to Bowie around the release of the self-titled Deram Records debut. Lee was certainly one of the many affairs that Bowie had once the couple started cohabiting in ’68. By then, Lee had parlayed his enthusiasm and intellectual intensity into a position at Mercury. Like Bowie, Lee was open to bisexual experiences. “I’m basically bi but it’s five percent girls and ninety-five percent boys,” he tells me. “I think it’s sort of being greedy; instead of only dealing with fifty percent of the population, I’m open to dealing with one hundred percent of the population.”

  He recalls seeing Bowie, Hermione and Hutchinson in Feathers. “She was a very pretty ballet dancer,” he says. “I liked her. But I’m sure even if she wasn’t English she would not have approved of me and David. You’re talking about potential rivals. I’m sure she didn’t like Ken Pitt either.”

  Pitt despised Lee, whom he referred to as “the first of the predators” (with Angie, whom Lee would soon bring to Mercury Records as a marketing assistant, being the second). Lee’s flat became not only a place for dalliances but somewhere that David could play guitar and complain. Enamored with Bowie’s beauty, creativity and intelligence, Lee was happy to lend a sympathetic ear.

  “He would get migraines,” Lee says. “He felt like he was being pulled in all of these different directions.”

  Lee told the then label-less Bowie that he belonged on Mercury and even tried to get him a deal but met with resistance from his boss, Lou Reizner. Reizner had recently moved to the London offices to become Mercury’s European director and seek out new talent. Among his first coups was signing Rod Stewart, then front man for the Faces, to a solo contract. Despite Lee (who became the assistant European director) and his limitless enthusiasm, Reizner was not interested in Bowie. “He hated him,” Lee says. “I think Bowie was too effeminate for him. He wrote a memo … I wish I had the letter. It said, ‘I see no potential for this artist in the U.S.’”

  Reizner was a singer and producer himself, having released a self-titled album on Mercury that year. “He was a Tom Jones type,” Lee says. “A baritone. It’s a good album. It’s sad that he could not see the potential for David too.”

  Although handsome in a tan-and-toothy, Bert Convy–ish fashion, Reizner lacked pop star DNA but took pride in his musicality and ability to discover, nurture and sell new artists. He would later shepherd the progrockers Van der Graaf Generator and Rick Wakeman of Yes (soon to be a Bowie studio musician). He is also responsible for the film All This and World War II, a montage of World War II stock footage scored with Beatles covers. This sounded like a good idea to Lou Reizner. David Bowie did not. Reizner, who eventually permitted Bowie to become a Mercury artist, died of cancer in 1977 at just forty-three.

  Hermione might not have known about Calvin Mark Lee explicitly, but she could sense that Bowie’s attractiveness was starting to infringe on their idyllic hippie home (in addition to allegedly dealing with Kenneth Pitt’s attentions, Bowie was embroiled in a love triangle with Kemp and Natasha Korniloff as well, one that ended with Kemp slashing his wrists in a suicide attempt). Those who knew David well, like Hutchinson, may have worried privately that at heart Bowie was simply too wild for Hermione, his “English rose.”

  “I think they were a really nice match for each other,” Hutchinson says, “but I guess I would have said that it wouldn’t have lasted. David was still very much a rock ’n’ roll sort of character. He and myself had gone a bit folksy, but … When we were making the Love You Till Tuesday film … it was when they started to fall out a bit. I never saw it. But I could feel the vibe while we were fil
ming.”

  Love You Till Tuesday was a film conceived by Bowie and Ken Pitt as a way to showcase all of David’s talents. Pitt raised the money for it himself, and given his good taste, the production value of the finished project is indeed top-notch. Beautifully lit and shot in lush “Eastman Color,” it is, unfortunately, a throwback to the cheeky-chappy mugging of Bowie’s Newley period and is by and large a collection of promotional films for singles like the title track that had already failed to chart.

  The strategy behind making Love You Till Tuesday was that if people could see David actually performing the songs, along with mime interludes, they would finally connect with what Bowie was all about. It can be argued that much of Love You Till Tuesday, which was helmed by a director of little acclaim named Malcolm J. Thomson, was ultimately influenced by the way Pitt viewed Bowie’s image: shampooed, smiling, dressed in neat gray suits with comically oversized belt buckles or wild colors. The real Bowie of that period, showcased in the segments featuring Hermione and Hutchinson, was a bit more of a musky street hippie, but the bulk of Love You Till Tuesday reduces Bowie to some scrubbed and polished showbiz action figure or doll.

  In the segment filmed for the track “When I’m Five,” Bowie attempts to project the blank-eyed purity of an actual five-year-old as he promises, “I will chew and spit tobacco like my grandfather Jones.” It’s such a sickly-sweet vignette, one is grateful for the unintentional and somewhat cruel hilarity of autobiographical lines like “I get headaches in the morning,” which clearly reflect his mental turmoil at the time.

  “Rubber Band” also resurfaces, with Bowie seemingly on leave from some brainwashed barbershop quartet. “Let Me Sleep Beside You” is considered again, a rocker in this context, but Bowie’s air-guitar strumming handily ruins any edge it might have brought. One can almost smell the polyester sweat and smoke in the studio. During the mime interlude Bowie performs a piece entitled “The Mask” in full whiteface. “Ken was very much like [the Lower Third and the Buzz’s manager] Ralph Horton,” Hutchinson says. “His affection for David clouded the whole thing. He didn’t understand what David was doing with Feathers. Ken’s not rock ’n’ roll either. He wanted David to be like Judy Garland. The thing that Ken liked best in Love You Till Tuesday was ‘The Mask,’ because there’s no music in it and David had no trousers on. And that says it all.”

  Before completion of the film project, Hermione was given an opportunity to audition for a musical entitled Song of Norway, starring Florence Henderson of Brady Bunch fame. Sensing perhaps that the project she was committed to was a turkey, she informed Bowie that she would not be able to complete the Feathers section of … Tuesday because of this conflict.

  “David seemed businesslike about Hermione leaving for the audition. He was crushed. But it wasn’t that long before I walked in and he was in bed with another girl, you know?,” Hutchinson says. Many Bowie books talk about his need for loyalty, listing tales of those excommunicated from the Bowie universe after either asking for more money (this would in part break up the Spiders from Mars in 1973) or criticizing his behavior (anyone who told him, “Perhaps you’re abusing the gak a bit, luv,” circa ’75 and early ’76). The departure of Hermione may have indeed wounded him, even if Bowie did not show it; in the future, whenever anybody’s behavior resembled Hermione’s they would be rapidly exiled. With the completion of Love You Till Tuesday, the Bowie-Farthingale hippie love affair was over, and Bowie, taking a page out of the Lindsay Kemp behavioral guide, dove headlong into flamboyant heartbreak.

  “Hey, one’s heart gets broken at that kind of age in a different kind of way, you know,” friend Dana Gillespie recalls. “It was the one then.”

  “I was in the depths of despair,” he would recall in 1971. “It was nearly two years ago but I don’t forget it because it was an important period and I’m still living off it.” Bowie channeled his pain into his music and during this period he wrote some of his best material, including the plaintive and literal “Letter to Hermione” and the more poetic “An Occasional Dream,” in which he sings of the idyllic “one hundred days” they’d ostensibly shared (“And we’d talk with our eyes / Of the sweetness in our lives”).

  Hermione filmed Song of Norway but is credited only as “Dancer.” Her career never took off but she met another dancer on the film’s Norwegian set and quickly entered into a new relationship. “The last time I saw her was about a year ago in the health food shop in Baker Street,” Ken Pitt said in 1974, “and she told me that she was thinking of giving up ballet because there was no work for her.”

  “She quite rightly ran off with a dancer that she had met while filming,” Bowie commented years later. “Then I heard she married an anthropologist and went to live in Borneo for a while, mapping out unknown rivers.” Hermione reportedly resurfaced years later when Bowie was in the midst of his Ziggy Stardust superfame, and the two briefly reconnected, but it soon became apparent that it was not meant to be. Still, Hermione has never really gone away. “It was Hermione who got me writing for and on a specific person,” Bowie said. The heartache she gave and the loneliness that he felt in the aftermath of their breakup on the set of Love You Till Tuesday would inspire David Bowie’s first truly immortal, and some would say signature, song, “Space Oddity.”

  “Like the Deram album the film was intended to be a CV and an audacious innovation at the time,” Pitt tells me. “It is now a valuable record of what D was actually into and we are left wondering what would have happened if I had not asked him to write what I considered to be an essential requirement of the film. Something new and very special. Would he still have written ‘Space Oddity’?”

  One of Bowie’s favorite albums released during this new darkly poetic wave of ’68 was Bookends, by Simon & Garfunkel. Songs like “America” reminded him of his teenage affinity for Kerouac. “Old Friends” pushed the same wistful buttons that his childhood favorite song, “The Inchworm” had. “A Hazy Shade of Winter” was wary and bitter but still somehow glamorous and cinematic. Like the Velvet Underground’s debut, and the just-released White Light, White Heat, it had New York cool to burn. The record’s druggy cred was sealed when Frances McDormand held it up for ridicule in 2000’s Almost Famous and pointed to the artists’ pupils on the cover shot: “Look at them. They’re on pot!” (Bowie would do a stripped down and stirring version of “America,” at the post-9/11 Concert for New York City in October of 2001.) Bookends is one key to this next phase of his songwriting. David, who, according to friends, was only consuming large quantities of hash and drinking wine at the time (despite some reports that he had started using heroin), envisioned a Simon & Garfunkel–style duo taking over where Feathers ended and set about writing songs that would feature two-part harmony rather than three.

  “He seemed to think, ‘Right, Hermione’s gone, that’s what we’re gonna do now,’” Hutchinson says. “Bookends had come out. Simon & Garfunkel were big. With them as role models, we did some demos. Bedroom tapes. Two guitars going. He would always just say, ‘I’ve got a couple of new ones,’ and play them for me. There was one called ‘Lover Till the Dawn.’ There was another, a song about a spaceman that I thought was a bit more unusual. It had come to him in part because of the current in those days. Space travel just started to happen. But you know that songs write themselves. You get an idea. The song comes to you. He said, ‘Silly one, but here it is.’ I don’t think we thought it was anything special. The title was just a piss-take on the Kubrick film.”

  “I remember he came ’round once to that flat that I was in and he said ‘I’ve just written this song a half an hour ago,’” says Gillespie. “And then he got up and strummed the chords and sang: ‘Ground control to Major Tom. Ground control to Major Tom.’ And I thought, ‘What an odd choice of lyric.’ People weren’t writing about things like that.”

  If the end of his love affair with Hermione and some form of narcotics-fueled isolation contributed to the vibe of “Space Oddity,” the tale of an astrona
ut, Major Tom, who deviates from his mission and winds up helplessly floating in space forever, then the catalyst for bringing it all together was indeed Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film adaptation of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film had opened in the West End that spring and attracted all kinds of “heads” with their stashes to figure out what the nonlinear and often dialogue-free images meant: “Okay, the tapirs are living among the monkeys until the monolith appears. That’s when mankind becomes violent! And the monkeys are no longer vegetarian and … whoa! Pass the liquid cannabis tincture, Bud.”

  It’s most likely the early scene in which an astronaut communicates with his daughter on her birthday that inspired “Space Oddity” more than the film’s iconic opening and paranoid ending. “Tell mama that I telephoned,” he says before ingesting a “stress pill.” The notion of space exploration compromising concrete familial affection or unity appealed to the newly single David, someone who had grown up with a short supply of the security and attention any child requires.

  Calvin Mark Lee knew that “Space Oddity” marked his chance to get Bowie signed to Mercury, so undeniable was its hit potential given the strength of the melody and the “space fever” that had taken over popular culture in the months leading up to the July Apollo 11 mission. At the start of ’69, defying Lou Reizner’s anti-Bowie sentiment, he financed the recording of a demo using Mercury equipment and studio time. “We had to do it all behind Lou’s back,” he tells me, his voice swelling with excitement nearly forty years later. “But it was such a good record.”