Bowie

by Wendy Leigh

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  For Dr. Erika Padan Freeman

  INTRODUCTION

  June 6, 1992

  Villa La Massa, Florence, Italy

  David Bowie’s allure has always partly been due to his capacity for confounding expectations, and the day of his wedding to Iman was no different.

  His friends and family initially assumed that the wedding reception would take place inside the secluded compound of Britannia Bay House, David and Iman’s Balinese-style estate on the tiny private Caribbean island of Mustique, overlooking the ocean and completely hidden from view of prying paparazzi and besotted Bowie fans alike. More than practically anywhere else in the world, Mustique is akin to a fortress, its borders closely guarded by officials who, if necessary, are quick and effective in banning journalists, photographers, and sundry undesirables from ever setting foot on its hallowed soil.

  Such was the high degree of security and the absence of intrusive press on Mustique that, some years before, Britain’s Princess Margaret was able to throw caution to the wind and cavort freely on the beach with London gangster and accused killer John Bindon (who, coincidentally, was also an intimate of David in the seventies). An enclave for only the very rich and famous, for kings and queens, princesses, billionaires, politicians, and tycoons, Mustique (which, despite its elite, jet-set allure, or perhaps because of it, Iman does not particularly like) is an airtight world of privilege and privacy.

  But regardless of the beauty of David’s Mustique home, and the security he’d be guaranteed by holding his wedding on the island, he instead opted for the cliché of throwing a public, celebrity-style wedding that would be immortalized in the pages of Hello! In deciding to sell his wedding to the magazine for a sum that might have been as much as four million dollars and agreeing to pose for photographs with Iman for hours, David opted for cold cash—yet also drove such a hard bargain that although he and Iman were photographed throughout the wedding ceremony at Saint James Episcopal Church in Florence, Italy (after which eight photographs were published in the magazine’s twenty-three-page coverage), and at the reception, he insured that the privacy of most of his sixty-eight guests was preserved, so that very few of them were photographed for Hello!

  Awarded pride of place at the wedding reception in Florence’s beautiful Villa La Massa, as befits her status as David’s mother, the regal Margaret Jones, an imposing woman of seventy-eight, though struggling with bad health, graces a plush, ornate, red velvet and gold cherub–garlanded throne. As Margaret—or Peggy, as she is known—gazes forthrightly into the camera, her blue eyes are clear, with a far-seeing psychic quality to them (she was said to have a talent for mental telepathy, one that David has claimed he shares). Her warm smile displays her snaggled front tooth, a twin to David’s (before he had it fixed through the miracle of cosmetic dentistry), and her palpable star quality and commanding presence are a testament to how close the apple has fallen to the maternal tree.

  Peggy had always been a brave and fearless pioneer, who in 1940s England wore pants long before they were acceptable attire for ladies. And like her son David—the world’s first rock star to publicly out himself, to talk to the press about his open marriage, to wear makeup, stark white nail polish, and dresses—Peggy was also a rebel, a woman born to flout the bourgeoisie. The mother of three illegitimate children (including David) at a time when a girl could have been ostracized by society for having even one, Peggy was never afraid to dance to a different drummer. Nor—and again the similarity to David is remarkable—was she afraid to embrace two diametrically opposed camps in a relatively short time span.

  Peggy briefly became enamored of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (the British equivalent of the Nazi Party) and in October 1936, when she was twenty-three years old, attended one of their rallies in the prosperous spa town of Tunbridge Wells. However, according to Peggy’s sister Pat, when protesters flung rotten fruit and vegetables at Mosley’s followers, Peggy was far more transfixed by the macho swagger of the Fascists in their fetching black shirts than by the fracas surrounding her.

  Yet though an acolyte of the British Union of Fascists, which routinely terrorized Jews all over Britain, less than ten years later, Peggy had a love affair with Jack Isaac Rosenberg, the son of a wealthy Jewish furrier, and bore him a son, David’s half brother Terry, nine years his senior.

  A similar dichotomy is evident in David’s own history. In 1976, he was accused of making the Nazi salute, while standing up in an open Mercedes convertible (an accusation that he went on to deny), and around the same time also threw out a few positive remarks about Hitler, proclaiming of him, “His overall objective was very good, and he was a marvelous morale booster. I mean, he was a perfect figurehead.”

  So that just as his mother was once seduced by the glittering visual image of Mosley’s Blackshirts, David clearly was as mesmerized by Nazi style, swagger, and sharp tailoring. Yet his good friend Marc Bolan was Jewish, and so is the second most important woman in his life (after Iman), his best friend and faithful retainer in every area of his private and public existence since 1974, Corinne “Coco” Schwab, an American who was born in the stock room at Bloomingdale’s, after her mother went into labor in the store’s linen department.

  At David’s wedding reception, Coco is all radiant smiles, her thick, efficient-looking, shiny black bob creating a helmet around her face, a reminder that she invariably plays bad cop to David’s good. As his gatekeeper and protector, Coco is legendary for her fierceness in eradicating from David’s universe all those whom she considers to be undesirable (including his first wife, Angie) and protecting him 24/7 at a cost to her own life and authentic existence. Coco’s dedication to David has always been unimpeachable, right through his drug-addled years and his divorce from Angie up to and beyond 2013, when she was on hand to assist in the making of his video for “Love Is Lost,” which premiered at the Mercury Music Awards.

  But during the wedding ceremony, as Iman glided up the aisle and joined him at the altar to the tune of “April in Paris,” the song with which David serenaded her when he proposed, it was inevitable that informed onlookers would speculate on the possibly troubling emotions simmering behind Coco’s poised and perfect smiling mask as she witnessed David’s wedding and the start of his second marriage.

  For Coco isn’t just David’s personal assistant, and her importance to him transcends such categorization, as does her enduring passion for him. Originally a receptionist/secretary at MainMan, Coco was employed by the company to work with David. As the years went by, she became his chief cheerleader, hand-holder, best friend, and has been thought to secretly harbor passionate desire for him.

  A vestal virgin catering to the high priest? Or a flesh-and-blood woman with a carnal appetite for him? Tony Zanetta, president of MainMan during those years, remembers Coco saying of David, “I really do love him. I love him so very much.”

  German fashion designer Claudia Skoda first met Coco in 1976 when David, Coco, and Iggy Pop visited her at the Berlin commune where she was then living and working. “David didn’t introduce Coco to me, and I initially assumed that she was Iggy’s wife. She isn’t a beauty queen, but she is intelligent, with sex appeal of a kind. People have said that she was a mother figure to David, but I couldn’t see that. She looked after him as if she was his girlfriend. With intimacy. I surmised that they were having an affair,” Claudia said.

  Whatever the truth, Coco has been in David’s life
for forty years. In 1987, he wrote “Never Let Me Down,” a song inspired by her friendship and her loyalty to him, and on her sixtieth birthday, he recognized Coco’s stellar service to him by gifting her with a ring studded with rose-colored diamonds.

  However, Coco’s loyalty sometimes translates into a fierceness that other people find intimidating. As someone who has worked closely with Bowie for some years has revealed, even his venerable British publicist, Alan Edwards, who has masterminded Bowie’s publicity for decades, is still slightly apprehensive when Coco sweeps into London, and makes it clear to everyone who deals with her, “Whatever you do, don’t set Coco off. . . .”

  Coco has never failed David. And David remains loyal to her, and kind, as he has been to Ken Pitt, his manager in the late sixties, and who recalled last year, “I’m ninety now, and hadn’t seen David for years, but about four years ago, there was a knock at my door and it was David. He didn’t seem that well, but we talked for over an hour. It was a lovely thing to do.”

  Not only that, but each year since they first met, and right up till now, David has sent Ken Pitt a Christmas present, and also regularly sends him editions of rare secondhand books that he feels Ken might relish.

  David is also generous with his advice to other up-and-coming artists, and additionally has spent considerable time and energy helping young people who are struggling with drug habits, as he himself once did. Costume designer Ola Hudson, with whom David had a three-year affair, begged him to talk to her son Saul (Slash of Guns N’ Roses) about drugs.

  “David was engaging and wise in the ways of chemical abuse. He asked me about what I was doing drug-wise and what I was going through emotionally, psychically, and with the band,” Slash said. “I rambled on for a while, but once I started talking about my little translucent friends, David interrupted me.

  “ ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘You are not in a good way. If you are seeing things every day, what you are doing to yourself is not good at all. You are at a very spiritual low point when that begins to happen. You are exposing yourself to the darker realms of your subconscious being. You are making yourself vulnerable to all kinds of negative energy.’ ”

  Slash wasn’t the only person struggling with addiction whom David tried to help. Famously, Iggy Pop was another, but David didn’t just try to rescue those close to him. Makeup artist Carolyn Cowan was in Dublin in 1991, working with David on a video he was shooting there. She was battling with her addiction to crack cocaine and drinking far too much, as well. Though he hardly knew Carolyn, David immediately sensed that she was in trouble. From then on, every day of the shoot, he asked her if she had managed to stay sober the night before. The truth was that she hadn’t, and David knew it.

  “By the third day, he had persuaded me to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Everything he’d said had finally got through to me and now I’m so grateful for his intervention,” she said. “David Bowie saved my life. I have no doubt about it. He was never judgmental—just kind,” Carolyn said.

  And photographer Joe Stevens, who first met him in the days of Ziggy Stardust, also remembered his kindness and generosity: “A close friend had a triple bypass operation, and as he was an uninsured artist, he was unable to pay his medical bills. Bowie covered them, secretly,” he said.

  David’s kindness manifests itself in other contexts as well, and he never pulls rank over others less successful than he is—which means just about the entire world. In the early 1990s, iconoclastic Indian singer Asha Puthli attended a party at David’s Mustique house. “He came up to me and said, ‘Asha, I have your first album. It’s in my special collection. I shall always keep it,’ ” she said. “I recorded that album in 1973. David is the kindest musician I have ever met.”

  He is also one of the most polite. His manners are impeccable, even under the most trying of circumstances. Even as far back as October 1972, in Los Angeles, David demonstrated an innate noblesse oblige. Following David’s Santa Monica Civic Auditorium concert, DJ Wolfman Jack threw a party at his home, during which the guest of honor, David, fixed on a girl on the dance floor swirling around sexily with legendary wild man of rock six-foot-four-and-a-half Kim Fowley. When the dance was over, David tentatively approached Kim, and the following dialogue ensued:

  “Is she with you?” David inquired politely.

  “No,” Kim said.

  “Are you in love with her?” David probed.

  “No.”

  Empowered, he asked Kim if he intended to have sex with the dancing girl. On being assured by Kim that he did not, David put all his cards on the table, as it were, and confessed to him that he wanted to have sex with her.

  “Can you escort me across the dance floor?” David asked.

  Kim complied and watched as David moved closer to the dancing girl.

  “My name is David Bowie,” he said quietly, and then added, “Would you like to accompany me to the bathroom?”

  She didn’t think twice and followed David immediately. Together, they walked into the bathroom. They locked the door and did not emerge until after quite some time. At that point, David kissed her on the cheek, shook her hand, and said, “Thank you,” and off she went, charmed to the toes by David and his good manners.

  So was Kim Fowley.

  “Thank you very much” were David’s last words to him that night.

  Another important guest at David’s wedding was yet another strong woman in the mold of Iman and of Coco Schwab. John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, was an honored guest at the wedding, primarily because David nurtured warm memories of John and, from their first meeting, respected him immensely. That respect was mutual. For although John did once crack, “Meeting David Bowie is always interesting, because you never know which one you are meeting,” John was always fond of David and was wholehearted in his support of his career. So much so that in the very last interview of his life, on the Friday before he was slaughtered, John had dinner at Mr. Chow with BBC broadcaster Andy Peebles, who was also in Manhattan to interview David, then starring on Broadway as John Merrick in The Elephant Man.

  “John Lennon was very interested that I was talking to David the next day, and said that he thought David was a very talented man, and very gifted. He said that it was amazing that David was doing The Elephant Man,” Andy Peebles said.

  Playing John Merrick, a man born with a tragic facial deformity, was a triumph for David. Yet at the same time, his decision to play a misfit in his Broadway debut tells a tale about David Bowie, the man. The only child his parents had together, David was born left-handed, which in 1950s England was considered a disgrace, an aberration that had to be corrected at all costs. “At school, I remember very distinctly kids laughing at me because I would draw and write with my left hand,” David said.

  His schoolmates yelled that he was “the devil,” simply because he wrote with his left hand. Worse still, “the teacher used to smack my hand to try and make me right-handed,” he said.

  The teacher tried her utmost, but in spite of her frequent attempts to force David to favor his right hand over his left, he instinctively resisted and continued to use his left hand regardless. Nonetheless, the battle had left him scarred and also served to forge iron in his soul. He said, many years later, “It put me outside of others immediately. I didn’t feel the same as the others because of that. . . . So I think it might have been one of those tips of how I was going to evaluate my journey through life: All right, I’m not the same as you motherfuckers, so I’ll be better than you.”

  His deep-rooted sense of isolation and drive toward nonconformity were cemented yet further when he was thirteen and was almost robbed of the sight of his left eye, causing him to suffer the medical condition anisocoria, so that he emerged with two markedly different-looking eyes. Not an easy condition for a young boy to cope with, especially in the rough-and-tumble environment of growing up on the fringes of South London. Consequently, David felt like an outcast, a pariah, and his sympathies have always veered toward
the underdog, those who walk on the wild side. “It’s a subject I’m fascinated in . . . gigolos, male escorts, male hookers,” he once said.

  His fascination with sexual outlaws is natural, given his own history. David, initially celebrated for his androgyny, has always been the ultimate sexual liberator, trumpeting sexual freedom and diversity openly and proudly. He did so first in his songwriting, one of the many facets of his genius (along with performing, painting, and art directing every element of his entire existence), and wrote lyrics dealing with gender-bending in “Rebel, Rebel,” “Suffragette City,” “Queen Bitch,” and “Oh, You Pretty Things.”

  On a personal level, by declaring to the press that he was gay at a time when even Elton John was still in the closet, then amending the announcement by saying he was bisexual, by wearing a dress in public, and by being consistently unafraid to cite his various sexual proclivities to interviewers, Bowie smashed through the accepted barrier of what was considered “normal” sexuality and, in the process, freed many a fan from his prison of sexual aloneness.

  The truth is that, rather like a latter-day Tom Jones in Henry Fielding’s book of the same name, David has adventured his way from sexual experience to sexual experience, embracing gay sex, threesomes, group sex, straight sex, then, perhaps most startlingly of all, monogamous marriage.

  David’s amorous exploits through the years amount to an extremely multifaceted sexual odyssey, which can be attributed not only to his good looks, his trim, toned, and flexible body, his high-octane libido, his impressive, much-vaunted endowment, his star quality and massive powers of attraction, but also to the fact that Bowie has always been an equal-opportunity lover. Neither age, race, religion, nor the looks of his lovers has ever prevented him from following the siren’s song of his lust, wherever it might lure him.

  A brief, kaleidoscopic overview of his conquests: Bette Midler (reportedly an isolated incident in a closet); record executive Calvin Mark Lee; Playboy model and actress Bebe Buell; Nina Simone (who inspired him to record “Wild Is the Wind,” which she had recorded first); Charlie Chaplin’s widow, Oona, (twenty-two years his senior); dancer Melissa Hurley (twenty years his junior); singer Ava Cherry; Jean Millington, of the rock band Fanny; and model Winona Williams, whom he invited to live in Berlin with him.