Bowie: A Biography (21 page)

A self-described “Europhile,” Angie was already familiar with London culture. She had family friends who lived there and spent holidays in the city. “It was exciting. The magazines. Pirate radio was happening. And the bands. British youth didn’t want to accept this whole American rock ’n’ roll thing; particularly the Rolling Stones were reminding everyone that rock ’n’ roll was based on the tunes of African American artists. The mods-and-rockers thing was fun too. The mods versus rockers riots were the first time anyone young was on TV. They were talking about them like they were criminals; didn’t matter, they were on the news. It was giving them power. By the late sixties, we all felt on top of the world. We felt like the idiots who caused wars had gotten out of it by the skin of their teeth, and now the next generation was gonna prove that peace was a better thing.”

In her senior year, in 1966, at age sixteen, she tried to start a career that might enable to her remain in London. “I tried to do some modeling my last year of college in England. Took the shots. ‘Sorry, you look far too intelligent to be a model.’”

“Did you think you were beautiful?” I asked her, wondering how someone would just decide to launch a career as a professional model.

“No. I thought that I looked intelligent. That was not beautiful. You gotta look dumb and suck a lot! That was considered exciting by anyone in the entertainment business at that time. I don’t have that attitude and certainly wasn’t prepared to give them an inch.”

The fact that Angie offered herself up to the modeling industry gives you some idea of her force of will and sense of confidence. She wore her
dirty-blond hair short, was given to wearing tailored men’s suits and used her extreme charisma to make an impression on both men and women of all persuasions, including Calvin Mark Lee and Lou Reizner (whom she also began dating around this time).

“I always dressed as a man, which was probably another reason that Calvin and I got along very well,” she writes in
Backstage Passes
. “I decided that we were quite sympathetic and we got along quite well—a similar sense of humor and lewd attitude towards women.”

Lee encouraged her to pursue a serious position at the label. “Calvin was from San Francisco,” she says. “He understood that you couldn’t sweep women under the carpet. Lou Reizner was old school. But [label head] Irving Green loved me; every time they would come to London to see how their operation was going they would insist to Lou, ‘You have to make sure Mary Angela is there. You should give her a job. She needs to work for Mercury.’ I was still thinking, ‘What am I going to do and how am I gonna stay in England?’ I had to get an American company to hire me. Green cards were so hard to get. I would be taking a job from an English kid. So by the second year of college I was already figuring out how I could stay. I thought if I could become indispensable to Calvin and Lou as a marketing agent, I would be able to stay in London. So that’s what I got busy doing. David was my first marketing case.” She was essentially his A & R person as well, helping Lee convince Lou Reizner to allow Bowie to be signed to the label in the first place.

“[Reizner] hated me,” David told Cameron Crowe. “She thought I was great. Ultimately she threatened to leave him if he didn’t sign me. So he signed me.”

By the time they got together romantically, David Bowie was a Mercury artist. The story of their union has been told many times in many Bowie biographies, as well as Angie’s own memoirs. At Calvin Mark Lee’s invitation, she attended a record release fete for another Mercury signing, King Crimson. She was wearing a purple velvet three-piece suit with a matching silk tie and stood out among the hippies, professional and otherwise. David, in T-shirt and simple trousers, could not resist asking her to dance (famously inquiring “Do you jive?”—a pick-up line that does not work unless you are David Bowie). Angie did indeed jive, and soon … they were jiving and then some.

“I came back from being away for a few days; the flat was spic and span,” Finnegan recalls. “David never ever cleaned up after himself. He was a total slob. Always a sink full of dirty dishes, overflowing ashtrays, clothes everywhere.” Given his fastidious mother (“She was a very strange sort of uncommunicative woman. Very straitlaced, very stiff,” according to Finnegan), David must have relished having his own space to leave in funky disarray. Angie was not, however, going to abide it.

“Suddenly it was all washed up tidy,” Finnegan says. “David and I were always in and out of each other’s room in a perfectly normal, natural way. We’d had a relationship. So I went into his room and there I found a half-written song lying by his bedside. The lyrics were talking about ‘beautiful Angie.’ So the penny dropped. The next thing I knew he’d moved her in. Sensing I was miffed, Angie of course launched a formidable charm offensive. She was a very highly strung young woman. Openly bisexual, incredibly creative and formidably energetic and very beautiful. I think he was in love with her.”

Despite the powerful sexual attraction and what must have been a hint of narcissism (they were similarly built physically, had similar hair and skin color), Angela and David really bonded over a shared sense of ambition and drive. “He studied mime,” she says, impressed still, some four decades on. “To be with Hermione he learned ballet. I thought if he was that well versed and Ken Pitt had been making sure, as far as acting was concerned, he could do whatever we needed him to do, it made him different and my job was to market him. You start with what you’ve got and you work on that. He had this ability to pick up a skill. He was extremely talented. Please do not believe any of the bullshit about him. He’s very brilliant. He’s a multi-instrumentalist. And the focus that it takes to learn those things, I’m sure it was one of the reasons we were good together. You can’t have big ambitions and big dreams if you think the person that you’re dreaming them with can’t handle it. You know what I mean. You would fall flat on your face before you got out of the gate. So my dreams were inspired by him. Those dreams that I thought of putting together were because he had the goods.”

“David was ensnared by his first experience of meeting a female of that American pushy raucous coed bobby-soxer syndrome. He had never seen anything like it, whereas I had become acquainted with the species during my many visits to the U.S.,” Pitt writes me. “I did regret that she
chose not to support me in my work for David but to do all she could to undermine it, all to her own personal advantage of course.”

“I have a very soft spot for Americans,” Ray Stevenson says. “They just do things where English people go, ‘Oh, that would be nice, but …’ And yet Angie was a bit pushy. A bit loud. What really blew it: we were up watching the moon landing and Angie decided she was going out for a walk. Came back a half hour later telling everyone, ‘I saw these little green men, they landed at the end of Foxgrove Road!’ What you expect from a three-year-old. Preposterous.”

What’s indisputable is that she put the Arts Lab in perspective and helped extricate Bowie from what might have been a terminal case of hippie navel-gazing. “The whole Arts Lab scene. I got so sick of it,” she says. “It’s so political. Just the mention of it flashes me back years and I’m right back in a ‘meeting’ arguing over who had kudos and who didn’t … it was a nightmare! I had a diploma in marketing and economics. I couldn’t do that bullshit. I’d look at them and say, ‘Look, the movement is just a marketing thing. Everyone who’s saying no to us, they’re idiots. The [older generation] had a world war. They killed all these people. We’ve got to reclaim the world.’ And it was a big deal for me. They shushed me a lot. I was written off as the intellectual.”

If Angie’s accelerated approach to empowerment clashed somewhat with the elliptical Arts Lab, her approach to the handling of Bowie ran head-on into Kenneth Pitt’s gentlemanly fifties-and-early-sixties-bred style. In July, Pitt had arranged several appearances designed to promote the “Space Oddity” single, including a “song festival” on the Italian island of Malta. Pitt was likely happy to be alone with David after the distance put between them thanks to Bowie’s less manageable stints in Feathers and at the Arts Lab. Despite the more contemporary, rockier material he’d been working on for the
Space Oddity
album sessions with Visconti (who was back on board after declining to produce the title track), Pitt suggested that David sing “When I Live My Dream” from the two-year-old Deram debut.

Angie flew home to visit her parents in Cyprus to tell them all about her new boyfriend. David sent her postcards from Italy while traveling with Pitt. Either put off by Pitt or in emotional need, he gave Angie the sense that her presence was missed. She talked her parents into booking
an airplane ticket and soon, to Pitt’s chagrin, she was joining Bowie in Italy. Angie agreed with him about the relative dustiness of the old cabaret material. She even criticized the outfit Pitt had picked out for Bowie and loudly insisted that he start dressing in more modern gear.

“David was thrilled; Ken wasn’t,” she writes in
Backstage Passes
. “He had to find another room and I don’t think it was the inconvenience that really bothered him. Talk about a snit. And there’s nothing, thank God, like the ire of a queen whose affection has been spurned.”

Ken Pitt says he initially figured Angie was Jewish because she was so forward. I asked him about this and he answered, “I knew a number of people named Barnett and without exception they were Jewish. I suppose that when Angela appeared on the scene I might have asked D if she was Jewish. And he would then have said to her, ‘Ken thinks you are Jewish.’ I didn’t think she was Jewish, I only wondered. To this day I don’t know and quite honestly I couldn’t care less. But then again perhaps I didn’t ask D that question at all and this is just A’s troublemaking.” As I indicated earlier, Pitt would later identify her as the second (to Lee’s first) of the predators who would help remove David from his care. At the time, he thought she was more or less amusing. He simply did not know who he was dealing with.

There were several incidents around this period that also helped prime Bowie to pursue rock ’n’ roll as opposed to pop or cabaret. Marc Bolan was busy transforming Tyrannosaurus Rex, his bongos-and-acoustic-folk act, into a lean, sexy electric rock band called simply T. Rex. He was reinventing himself as a Les Paul–wielding rock god with tight satin trousers and muscle tees with his own visage emblazoned across the chest. Bolan invited Bowie to open for him during a short tour in the late winter of 1969. Bowie opted to do a mime performance designed to publicize the plight of the oppressed Tibetan people, as well as his standby “The Mask,” and was often heckled. Also that year, he spent time on the road with Peter Frampton’s new act Humble Pie, which was managed by the Stones’ ex-manger Andrew Loog Oldham and featured former Small Faces vocalist Steve Marriott, an early Bowie hero, on vocals. They were enjoying huge success in both England and America. This time he played material that would end up on the
Space Oddity
record and saw a veritable fork in the road professionally. The older, folkier songs left him
jeered at and pelted. The more energetic songs were cheered and hooted over. He witnessed how Humble Pie were treated: like rock royalty with rock royalties. It was tempting.

“He was our special guest,” Frampton says. “David just played a twelve-string acoustic. He had no road manager, no tech; when he broke a string, he literally changed the string onstage.”

While Bowie was in Italy making his much contended appearance, his father took seriously ill. Angie had recently flown back to visit with her own parents in Cyprus. David returned to England proudly carrying a trophy he’d been awarded at the festival. John Jones had collapsed in the street with a fever days before and rather than take him to the hospital, Peggy kept him confined to bed in hopes that he would recover. Without professional care, his fever turned into pneumonia.

“David arrived home carrying the statuette that he had won at the contest that he’d been to with Ken Pitt and dashed straight up to see his father, who hadn’t been well for a number of days,” Peggy recalled. “David handed the statuette to his father, telling him that he’d won the contest, and his father told him that he knew he would succeed in the end. He died not long afterward.”

Bowie called Angie to tell her the news, and she quickly made arrangements to come to his aid once again, a pattern that would emerge in their relationship both before and after his superstardom. He was naturally overwhelmed emotionally. He did not know how to deal with his bereaved mother, the funeral and John Jones’s affairs on his own, and soon Angie was applying to this tragedy the same forceful sense of getting it done that she had to Mary Finnegan’s kitchen, the Three Tuns Arts Lab and David’s career. “It wasn’t easy,” Angie recalled. “There were only two bedrooms and I had to share a bedroom with David’s mother, a living arrangement that I just wasn’t used to. I felt David’s mother didn’t really like me, and having to share a bed with her really drove me nuts.”

John Jones kept his papers neatly arranged. Aside from sad details such as how to dispose of his false teeth, the real challenge was dealing with the survivors. John had controlled the bill paying and general organization of things, leaving, like many of his generaton, the housework and homemaking to Peggy. Now both Peggy and Terry Burns would need care.

To say that David Bowie changed as a person when his father died is to state the obvious. The death of a parent in any context is cataclysmic, but when it hits unexpectedly during a rush of professional commitments, it’s especially jarring. It should be noted that his work changed as well. At John Jones’s funeral in the first week of August 1969, he didn’t cry but rather seemed to be internalizing everything. The cast of his music would suggest this as well.
Space Oddity
and its follow-up, 1970’s
The Man Who Sold the World
, are among his darkest albums. Both depict a man coming of age in a world that is increasingly depraved and barren. “He was in an absolutely foul mood,” Finnegan says, recalling one of the Arts Lab events that followed John’s demise. “Black as thunder, rude and nasty to everybody.” These new songs wonder, both abstractly and directly, who or what to turn to for spiritual and parental guidance. By 1971
Hunky Dory
would reflect the romance with Angie and the birth of their child, but it would take some time to arrive at that warmer and happier place. David was a boy, cared for by managers and those who found him attractive and charming.