Bowie (11 page)

“When we met, we were both fucking the same bloke,” David would phrase it to the press some years later, and so they were.

Soon enough, David told her about the existence of Mary in his life, as well. “We work together, but we don’t belong to one another. People don’t belong to each other. She has her life and I have mine,” he said blithely.

Fortunately for Angie, Mary wasn’t around to elaborate on the intimate details of her relationship with David. “I found him incredibly attractive right from the start,” Mary said later in a newspaper tell-all, revealing, “He was slim with this pale, pale skin, but he was very well endowed.”

Then, putting her recollections on a more decorous plane, she went on: “The room would be all warm, there would be incense burning and a joint ready to smoke. . . . The atmosphere was so heady and sensual, it was inevitable we’d end up in bed. David seemed to love the ritual. He was not the kind of man who had to make love every night, but when it happened it lasted for hours and hours.”

Her other recollections of David were not so sanguine. “I would go so far as to say he’s a slob. He always expected other people to clean up after him. He was totally oblivious of mess and basically needed an army of servants keeping things organized around him,” she said.

Although Angie was nonplussed on learning about the existence of Mary, determined not to demonstrate any sexual jealousy (a trait
that she despised and always would), she maintained her sangfroid. After supper, she and David and Calvin moved on to the Speakeasy Club, where she and David took to the dance floor and jived together in complete unison. Sometime during the evening, she confided in him that she had been expelled from school because she’d had a sexual relationship with another woman. Unlike most men to whom she had revealed the same story, David didn’t bat an eyelash, just as she had hoped that he wouldn’t.

“You only did what you felt. That’s how love is. You can’t control those kinds of feelings,” he said reassuringly.

The following night, he and Angie dined together again, only this time alone. And after dinner, they went back to Angie’s apartment and consummated their relationship.

“Sex with David was nice, and encouraged intimacy, but it wasn’t the kind of overwhelming experience sex can be,” she wrote. “He was a stud, not a sensualist, and I found myself in a situation all too common among young women: the sex frequent and vigorous, but the ultimate pleasure elusive or, as in my case, unattainable.”

This verdict, given long after their divorce, and immortalized in her 1993 memoir,
Backstage Passes
, differs considerably from that which she gave in her 1981 memoir,
Free Spirit
, where she deemed making love to him a “fulfilling experience.”

But whatever the truth, from the time of their first shared sexual exploration, she was sufficiently aroused by him so that when, the very next day, he called, told her he had the flu, and asked her to come to his house and minister to him, she did just that. Mary Finnigan was away on a journalistic assignment at the time, and Angie eagerly threw herself into her self-imposed role of mother to David, and so it would continue between them.

She had inadvertently stumbled on an important truth about him. As his onetime fling Natasha Korniloff once put it, “He’s always either hungry or tired or cold, or any combination of the three, and if you can satisfy his immediate demands, like put another coat on him or
feed him something, of which he will eat only a bit, or make him a little nest to sleep in, he’s absolutely and totally happy. Then he wakes up and goes to work.”

But much as Angie might baby David on occasion, part of her lure for him was that she was as freewheeling about sex as he was. In the future, they would happily switch sexual identities, with Angie playing the male, and David the female. Soon Angie had made a friend of Mary to such a degree that, with Mary’s consent, Angie moved in with her and David, Angie and David sleeping in one room and Mary in another.

Professionally, too, David’s career was finally proceeding apace. In July, before releasing “Space Oddity,” he sent Pete Townshend of the Who a copy. “He had the goodness to write me a note afterwards, saying that he liked the song very much,” David remembered, and then said, “I thought, ‘If I ever get really big, I’ll try to be as nice as that to people.’ ”

The song was quirky, unusual, somewhat of a novelty number, and when David sang it at a disco at London’s Imperial College, he was almost booed off the stage.

“I was so angry, I took the microphone and said, ‘Remember the name David Bowie. He’s going to be a star and you’ll remember the day you booed him offstage,’ ” DJ Bob Harris, who accompanied David to the gig, remembered.

David was indeed destined for stardom, but not with the initial release of “Space Oddity.” Though the song gained notice when, five days after its release, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, it was felt by some critics to be too downbeat, with its suggestion that Major Tom would never return from space.

However, some writers, like Penny Valentine, one of David’s strongest supporters amongst the media, came out in favor of “Space Oddity.” Valentine raved, “I listened spellbound throughout, panting to know the outcome of poor Major Tom and his trip into the outer hemisphere.” She then compared the record to the Bee Gees’ “NewYork
Mining Disaster,” an unerringly accurate perception on her part. The record had been released on the Mercury label, but not without some help from an unexpected quarter, as David admitted in a subsequent interview.

Referring to Lou Reizner and to Angie, David said, “He hated me. She thought I was great. Ultimately, she threatened to leave him if he didn’t sign me. So he signed me.”

In Angie, David had found a loyal champion who would fight for him till the end, and who would be by his side until she was no longer useful to him. Discarding those who had outlived their usefulness to him was one of David’s less palatable traits, as Angie and quite a few others who crossed his path, would subsequently discover.

 SIX 

ON THE WILD SIDE

A
lthough “Space Oddity” wouldn’t hit the charts until September, when it climbed to number 48, and reached a peak in November, when it soared to number 5 in the hit parade, it appeared that David’s future—both professional and personal, now that he was happy with Angie—was assured. However, less than a month after the song’s release, David was in Europe with Ken Pitt, competing in a song contest; right after he won, he learned that his father was sick and in critical condition. As soon as he heard the news, David flew home and rushed to his bedside.

“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 afterwards,” Peggy Jones told broadcaster Kerry Juby.

“David and his father were devoted to each other,” Ken Pitt told George Tremlett. “He was genteel and eloquent . . . and always concerned that David should behave properly in every situation.”

In years to come, David was to say that he regretted that he had never been able to talk openly to his father. “He just died at the wrong damn time, because there were so many things I would have loved to have said.”

However little he may have communicated with his father during his lifetime, David had always been clear about his debt to him. John Haywood Jones had introduced him to reading and a love of books, and by example, had demonstrated the intricacies of PR and dealing with the press and had supported his son’s career every step of the way. And now he was gone. When David heard the news of his father’s death, he was in the midst of recording, and momentarily broke down in tears, but then carried on.

Ken Pitt, who had always respected John Jones, immediately rushed to David’s side and later recalled that he “was very shaken, but calm. He was crying a bit, which was understandable.” Then he and David set about the sad task of dealing with John Jones’s business affairs, aware that he had always been a tidy and organized man and that they would be able to sort things out very quickly.

Looking back, Ken said that the thing he most remembered was “David turning to me, as we stood by the desk looking at John’s dentures, and David saying, ‘I know it sounds a silly question, Ken, but what do I do about his teeth?’ ”

On Ken’s advice, he dropped them into a wastepaper basket. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, a relatively calm Peggy was downing cup of tea after cup of tea. Even under the circumstances, David had enough self-control not to turn on her. But in the deepest recesses of his heart, he blamed his mother for his father’s death, reasoning that she hadn’t called the doctor soon enough.

From then on, the tension between mother and son escalated. Although David was on hand to help arrange his father’s funeral, he found the prospect of looking after his mother unpleasant, particularly as she had taken a strong dislike to Angie and routinely screamed that she was “a slut.”

Despite that fact that he was in mourning for his father, or perhaps because of it, David threw himself into his work with a vengeance. In November, he appeared at the Purcell Room, and afterward, Tony Palmer,
The Observer
’s well-respected reviewer, enthused, “On stage
he is quite devastatingly beautiful. With his loofah hair and blue eyes, he pads around like every schoolgirl’s wonder movie star. He smiles; you melt. He winks; you disintegrate.”

Back in Plaistow Grove, where Angie and David were staying with his mother after the funeral (David sleeping alone in one bedroom, and Angie forced to sleep in another with Peggy, simply because Peggy considered it an outrage that her son was living in sin with Angie), the situation was close to the breaking point. As the weeks went by, David’s relationship with his mother downward spiraled further, no matter how much he and Angie tried to pacify her. (One tactic included buying her a mink coat, which Peggy automatically accepted, but without gratitude, complaining publicly that, as she was a retiree, she had no use for it.)

Despite the fact that Angie and David paid for her to go to Cyprus and spend six months there with Angie’s parents, she still loathed Angie and rued the day that she’d come into David’s life. In the end, the ever-resourceful Angie took matters into her own hands and found somewhere else for herself and David to live. Haddon Hall, the Edwardian mansion at 42 Southend Road, Beckenham, where she and David moved in September 1969, would have made the perfect rock star palace had it not been divided up into apartments.

Meanwhile, they found an apartment for David’s mother in nearby Albemarle Road, Beckenham, which they helped her to furnish. Not in the least bit mollified, Peggy took to calling Angie at Haddon Hall on a daily basis, berating her. Rattled in the extreme, Angie focused instead on creating a life for herself and David in their new home.

They had rented Haddon Hall’s ground floor apartment 7 for a sum of money reportedly between £8 and £14 a week. A minstrel’s gallery at the top of the stairs, which would come in handy down the line when David’s band members needed a place to crash, was one of Haddon Hall’s most striking features. The apartment was blessed with a large entrance hall, and a dramatic staircase at the end of it, rather like something out of an antebellum mansion. An ornate stained-glass
window reflected light into the building and lent Haddon Hall an air of grandeur.

A Gothic monstrosity, part decaying mansion and part church, Haddon Hall came alive when Angie and David got to work and dedicated their creativity to decorating it, a task made easier when Angie’s parents gifted her some money with which to fund the work. Before that, though, they furnished Haddon Hall from cellar to rafters with nothing but orange crates, which, David confessed, “we nick from the market after it closes.”

Armed with her parents’ money, Angie masterminded Haddon Hall’s new look. The sitting room and bedroom ceilings were painted silver, the living room walls were daubed a dark green, and the bedroom walls were painted pink. The bedroom was dominated by a huge seven-foot wide Regency bed, which David had discovered in one of the local junk shops he had taken to haunting. Angie, revealing herself to be practical and able to turn her hand to a multitude of tasks, not only reupholstered a group of Gothic-style chairs in crushed red velvet but also dyed twenty-six lace drapes exactly the same shade of red.