by Wendy Leigh
Meanwhile, seven years into her marriage to David, Angie was unaware of his plans. Desperate to save the marriage, she had pinned her hopes on starting a new life with David in Switzerland, where she had gone to school. Using his tax problems as an excuse (and the truth was that had he remained in California, where he was then based, his tax bill would have been sky-high), she procured a seven-bedroom chalet near Blonay, overlooking Lake Geneva, where their nearest neighbors in Vevey were Charlie Chaplin, his wife, Oona, and their brood of eight children. But though the house, named Clos de Mésanges, was idyllic, and though Angie set about furnishing it exquisitely, David hated it on sight.
Nonetheless, still with Coco, his ever-present companion/nanny, constantly by his side, he spent some time there, while Angie, dispirited, went back to London, where she carried on her whirlwind drug-driven party existence without him, becoming more strung out.
Zowie, meanwhile, was primarily brought up by his nanny, Marion Skene, who was more of a parent to Zowie than David and Angie were. David did attempt to father Zowie in the best way in which he knew how, instilling in him a love of movies. When Zowie was seven, David would screen The Seahawk, a pirate movie starring Errol Flynn, for him. And when the boy was eight, David showed him a video of A Clockwork Orange, the movie that had played such a seminal part in his own career, influencing as it had, his creation Ziggy Stardust.
“I remember he was sitting with me on the sofa with his arm around me, explaining everything,” Zowie said, recalling with warmth and nostalgia the closeness he and his father had.
Stifled by the arid beauty of Switzerland, David, though he loved walking by Lake Geneva, painting, reading, and working on sculptures, found both the countryside and the house too serene to hold his attention. Berlin beckoned him partly because he had read Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (which was adapted into the movie Cabaret); it was set in the Weimar Republic years running up to World War II, featuring louche songbird Sally Bowles. Isherwood had painted the Berlin of those years as a decadent, lush city, which Toulouse-Lautrec might well have immortalized, just as he did Paris. Unhappily for David, though, as Isherwood informed him face-to-face when they finally met: “Young Bowie, people forget that I’m a very good fiction writer.”
The truth was that Berlin in the late seventies, far from being glamorous and debauched as depicted by Isherwood in his novel, was a grim, impoverished city, torn asunder in the Second World War, and dominated by the Wall and the heavy Russian presence ruling over half of it.
But David didn’t care. “I went to Berlin to find an environment unlike California, that dreadful, parasitic mire. It seemed foreign and alien to anything I’d been through. Rough and tough, not a sweet life.
“I was just doing things like shopping and walking around. Anything that had to do with survival and nothing to do with rock and roll.”
FOURTEEN
BERLIN
Coco was with David in Berlin, and so was Iggy, ostensibly playing Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Jeeves to his Wooster. But in actual fact, David’s oft-stated mission in inviting Iggy to come to Berlin to live with him was to help Iggy kick his drug habit. Along the way, of course, he also hoped to cure his own.
“David said he came to Berlin to get over drugs, but that was silly, as Berlin was a drug town,” fashion designer Claudia Skoda, who was a close friend to David during his time in Berlin, said afterward.
David acknowledged the truth years later. “I didn’t have any idea till I got there that Berlin was the smack capital of Europe,” he said wryly.
Nonetheless, he started to create a home for himself and Zowie there, spending more time with him and giving him some of the attention that Angie seemed unable to provide, as she was now deeply involved with actor Ray Martin and had traveled to Morocco to be with him.
Meanwhile, David did his utmost to transmit his own enthusiasms to Zowie and, as soon as he was old enough, gave him an 8mm camera. “He taught me, in a lovely way, the basics of making a movie,” Zowie remembered. After David taught him how to do storyboards, write scripts, and do the lighting, Zowie made animated movies featuring his Smurfs, and took to carrying his storyboards and scripts around with him in a blue box when he traveled to concerts with his father, playing with them backstage while David performed.
In February 1977, David was back in England, where Iggy gave his first solo concert at Friars Aylesbury. Though David played the keyboards and sang backup, “the Duke remained out of the stage spotlight and had certainly dressed down for the occasion,” journalist Nick Kent noted. “In an anorak and flat cap, he looked more like a registered taxi driver than a rock star.”
Despite David’s attempts to underplay himself, it was clear that he was now in charge of Iggy’s professional destiny—and some hard-core punk fans were not amused, with Johnny Thunders snarling, “Jim’s just Bowie’s bitch now.”
In March 1977, David went back to America with Iggy for his twenty-nine-performance Idiot tour, in which David would play keyboards in his backing band. Along the way, he invited Debbie Harry of Blondie to join them on the tour.
“Bowie and I both tried to hit on her backstage,” Iggy said. “We didn’t get anywhere, but she was always very smooth about it. It was always, ‘Hey, well, maybe another time when Chris [Stein] isn’t around,’ always very cool about it.”
Despite refusing both Iggy and David so very elegantly, Debbie was flattered to be hit on by them: “Of course,” she said, “it was a lot of fun. They’re two really great stars, musicians, and writers that I’ve always admired. The whole thing was mind-blowing to be on tour with them in the first place. And to have flirtations with guys like that was just the icing on the cake.”
Meanwhile, Angie Bowie still hoped to win David back. But during the few times she braved the journey to Berlin, he was drunk and stressed and once even had a panic attack—thinking that he was in the throes of heart failure, he was rushed to the British Military Hospital, where he had a full checkup and was given the all-clear.
But as rock-and-roll as his drink and drug intake still appeared to be, he had designed his Berlin existence to be as low-key and mundane as possible. After a short spell in a hotel, he rented an apartment at Hauptstraße 155, Schöneberg—the same part of Berlin where screen icon Marlene Dietrich (whose image and persona as a glamorous bisexual siren had influenced the style of his cover photograph on the Hunky Dory album) grew up. Far from the glamour of the Sherry-Netherland and Plaza suites to which he was accustomed, Hauptstraße 155 was a decaying five-story building painted a faded yellow, and David’s three-bedroom apartment was shabby, almost derelict, with rain leaking into it during stormy weather.
Nevertheless, he was content there, and established a daily ritual of starting the day with coffee and cigarettes at the nearby Nemesis café, where pictures of James Dean decorated the walls. Then there was Joe’s Beer House, on Berlin’s main drag, the Kurfürstendamm, and the Empire Bar—both places where he would drink vast quantities of his favorite beer, König Pilsener. Apart from these locales, he haunted neighborhood art galleries and bookstores, and anyplace where he could listen to the music of Kraftwerk. Wearing a flat cap and worker’s clothes he bought in a local Kreuzberg store, he was rarely recognized by fans.
However, despite David’s sincere attempt to get back on the straight and narrow again—and to help Iggy do the same—Iggy once confided to Rolling Stone that over the space of a week, he and David spent two days intoxicated, two days recovering, and three days sober. Describing their daily routine, Iggy said, “Get up in the morning on bread and cheese and eat. Then walk over the city, which hasn’t changed since 1910: organ grinders who still had monkeys, quality transvestite shows. A different world.
“By evening, I’d go have dinner with Bowie, see a film, or watch Starsky and Hutch—that was our big thing. If there wasn’t enough to do, I knew some bad people, and I’d get stoned and drunk. Sometimes I’d do the bad stuff with Bowie and the good stuff w
ith bad people.”
For a more objective view of David and Iggy’s life in Berlin, and of David and Iggy themselves, Claudia Skoda, who ran a Berlin artist’s commune, the Factory, remembered, “The first time David came to the Factory, a big loft on the sixth floor, which you reached via lift, David walked up all six flights with Coco and Iggy. He was thin and he had a beard, which I didn’t expect. He was much more underplayed than Iggy, who was cheeky and funny and immediately drew you to him.
“I was married at the time to an artist, Jurgen Skoda, a very handsome man, and we had an open marriage. David liked Jurgen because he was an artist. He loved painters, and saw musicians differently. His admiration was always for painters.
“He had come to Berlin for a new identity. He had been doing glam rock, but he was so intelligent that he knew he had to do something else. He and Iggy were friends and nothing else. He was also on drugs, but he wanted to help Iggy. Iggy was wild. David was a Thin White Duke and Iggy was a Rude Wild Guy.
“David was curious about Berlin. We used to hang out together in a group, and he never acted like a star. He was very friendly, but when he was drinking, he became sexually aggressive. He didn’t see straight then. He was okay when Coco was with him, but if he went out on his own, he got drunk and definitely had a groupie.
“He was a complete womanizer, and he always liked big, black, sexy, strong, dominant women. But after a one-night stand, which he usually had when he was drunk, the next morning he didn’t recognize the woman anymore.
“Once I was out at a club with him and a lesbian friend of mine, who had a female skinhead with her. David came on to the skinhead, all goo-goo eyes. She said, in a Berlin type of way, ‘What are you staring at me for?’
“He said, ‘You look like a female Marlon Brando.’ It was true, but she didn’t know what he was talking about. He wanted to go with her, but she didn’t want it. He said, ‘Come with me, I like you.’ He wanted to have her, but she told him she wasn’t interested. But he was a gentleman.”
Amid all the drugs and the womanizing, David did try and make an attempt to forge a more solid relationship with a woman. That woman was Winona Williams, who flew to Berlin at his invitation and spent time with him there.
“I went because I was trying to make up my mind about whether I wanted to commit to him, and he wanted me to see how I felt living with him there, as well,” Williams said. “While I was there, he painted a great deal, and also had all this Nazi memorabilia around him, including German propaganda minister Dr. Goebbels’s old desk, which he had in his apartment. It didn’t mean that he had any Nazi inclinations, or was anti-Semitic—just that he was interested in Nazi history and style,” she said.
One night, David took Winona to a small nightclub where they saw Romy Haag, a beautiful, intensely feminine-looking transvestite, still biologically a man (though she would eventually have a sex-change operation years later.) That night at the club with Winona was not the first time David had met Romy. They had met when she had been in the first row of his Thin White Duke show in Berlin in April 1976; their eyes met and “it was clear to both of us that we would spend time together,” Romy said afterward.
After that, they met again, at the Alcazar in Paris, and their relationship began. At the time of their first meeting, outwardly, Romy was a perfect woman—and a glamorous one, at that. However, David was captivated not only by Romy’s appearance, but by her artistry, as she mimed to songs at her own club in Berlin. There, she ended her act by brutally tearing off her wig and then smearing her lipstick straight across her face, so that it looked as if someone had slashed it. The theater was reminiscent of something Lindsay Kemp might have done and so irresistible to David that he used exactly the same theatrical effect at the end of the video of “Boys Keep Swinging.”
“Romy is very, very, feminine, and she was very much in fashion at the time when David met her. I can understand what he saw in her,” Claudia Skoda said.
David spent a great deal of his time in Berlin at Romy’s club. “He loved the energy of the club and was always sitting in the corner and watching everything. He was a little boy. A lovely boy, and I was twenty-three years old and I fell in love with his eyes,” Haag said. “He loved to be in the dressing room of my club, trying the clothes on, and we had a love affair.
“He was doing coke at the time, not lines of coke but bowls of it, and I had to put up with that. It got on my nerves sometimes. It was much too much.
“But to know the real David Bowie, you can’t do anything but love him. I have never considered myself to be a man; neither did David. God, how I love him,” she said.
As for David, according to Winona Williams: “David would have found Romy fascinating and, being the experimental person that he is, I think he would have had a relationship with her.”
His relationship with Romy endured until the evening of his thirtieth birthday, which he and Romy spent together at a nightclub. A paparazzo jumped out of the shadows and snapped a photograph of them together. Infuriated and believing that Romy had tipped off the paparazzi that he’d be at the club that night, David turned on her and blamed her for trying to exploit her relationship with him, and then and there ended it. Afterward, his anger continued to mount, and he accused her of “fucking up” his birthday for her own reasons. When she wasn’t around, he complained continually about her, accusing her of using their affair to boost her career.
And, much as she might have denied it, the events that transpired afterward seem to prove him right. Despite knowing how much he valued his privacy, Romy gave an interview about him to the prestigious Berliner Morgenpost and also revealed intimate details of their affair on TV talk shows. Even today, her nightclub act includes her bravura performance of David’s iconic song “Heroes.” Thirty-eight years since their relationship ended, the chief currency of Romy Haag’s career seems to be her past romance with David.
On a more personal level, when Claudia Skoda visited Romy’s apartment, David’s presence there remained palpable. “Romy had a nice photograph of them kissing on display,” Claudia remembered. “I asked her about it and she said, ‘Yes, we had an extraordinary relationship.’ ”
As for David, he has never talked about his relationship with Romy or how it ended. Nor has he been specific about his mental state in Berlin, although it was clear to those encountering him during that period that he was enamored with the myths surrounding the city, with the art, the history, the ghosts haunting the streets, the echoes of the past. And although he was at low ebb emotionally and physically, he used his time in Berlin to recharge his creativity and, perhaps most important of all, to forge an existence with Zowie and to distance himself yet further from Angie.
Negative stories filtered back to him from London, where she was attempting to make her mark as a cabaret artist, model, and actress, sometimes under the sobriquet Jip Jones. Along the way, she auditioned for the TV series of Wonder Woman, but, forever her own worst enemy, categorically refused to wear a bra and, as a result, didn’t get the part.
David was beset by the twin specters of Romy in Berlin, who had turned out to be a publicity-obsessed opportunist, and Angie in London, who demonstrated scant interest in mothering their son, Zowie, but was hell-bent on becoming a star in her own right. Additionally, he was living in a divided city populated by the survivors of Nazi Germany, escapees from East Germany, those separated from their loved ones. All this would incite a case of weltschmerz in all but the most stable, so it was hardly surprising that in Berlin, David drew close to the edge. More deliberately self-destructive than he had ever been, after having had a row with “somebody,” he took his car out of the garage and drove it around and around an underground parking lot, driving increasingly faster, secretly hoping against hope that he might hit a pillar and end his life that way.
“As I was getting up to forty and fifty, going round the corners, I remember looking at the dash, thinking, Jesus! Aren’t I going to crash soon?” he said. Remembering James D
ean and his tragic early death in a car crash, he said to himself, “I’ll put a twist on it—I’ll just crash into a pillar in this underground car park in Berlin.”
Fortunately, his death wish went unfulfilled, and he survived. But the temptation he felt at that moment spoke volumes about his passionate nature, and the suicidal tendencies still simmered very close to the surface of his nature, particularly here, in Berlin, the city of the Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich, the era that fascinated him so.
At the same time, thanks to living in Berlin, where he continually listened to the techno-rock of Kraftwerk, his creativity was set aflame, just as he knew it would be when he first moved there. As a result, the city ignited his God-given gift for turning a negative into a positive and milking his own life and experience and transmuting them into lyrics. Consequently, when it came to writing his next album, Low, he confessed, “The first of Low was all about me. Always crashing in the same car and all that self-pitying crap. Isn’t it great to be on your own? Let’s just pull down the blinds and fuck ’em all.”
Low proved to be a dramatic move for David, given how close he moved to Kraftwerk and away from the glam rock of Ziggy, Aladdin, and the Duke. Working with writer-producer Brian Eno on Low, he attributed the considerable volte-face in his music to Berlin itself. “I can’t write without conflict. That’s one reason I liked Berlin so much, because there’s so much friction there,” he said afterward, adding, “I found it the most convincing place to write. I could never write in a comfortable atmosphere. It would be ludicrous.”
Brian Eno would prove to be one of the most important of David’s collaborators ever. Until 1976, they had only met sporadically. Roxy Music had appeared with Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars at their show at the Rainbow, but David and Eno only really bonded after one of the Station to Station shows at London’s Wembley Stadium, when they talked for hours and conceived the idea of Eno working on Iggy’s first solo album, The Idiot.
