Bowie (26 page)

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.

Though that project didn’t come to fruition for Eno, his
Discreet Music
album of ambient music made a great impression on David. He and Eno had always experienced a strange brand of synchronicity. During David’s Ziggy Stardust days, Eno had also been an adherent of glam rock and had dressed accordingly. But then, like David, also influenced by Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, he decided to look to Berlin to reinvent himself.

Before recording
Low
at Château d’Hérouville, David and Brian spent hours brainstorming together. Iggy was also around, and would sing on one of the album’s tracks, “What in the World.” The lines were drawn clearly between David’s work and Eno’s, in that David would sing the vocals on the album and Eno would sing backup on some tracks, and direct and compose most of the second side of the album.

Z
owie was now primarily living with David in Berlin and going to school there. He had made friends with the other children, and seemed to be happy. David did his best as a father, but often was inadequate in communicating with him, and on those occasions, according to an eyewitness, they would sit together in awkward silence. The tension escalated when Angie arrived in Berlin for a visit and, in the heat of the moment, she and David had sex for the first time in a long time. But if Angie believed that this heralded a reconciliation, she was wrong. And, as always, Coco proved to be a stumbling block.

Over and over, Angie demanded that David fire Coco, cut her out of his life, but he refused—and with a combination of naïveté
and incredulity insisted, “Angie, how can you ask that? You know how much I rely on her. She’s part of the organization. She knows everything about my business. Who else could run it the way she could?”

Angie volunteered that
she
could, but David ignored her. When he discovered that Coco had fled the apartment, where she had her own room, he became extremely concerned and searched Berlin for her, desperate. However, having witnessed the level of his concern for Coco, Angie knew she had been vanquished.

Before she left Berlin, Angie executed one last dramatic move: She threw all of Coco’s things out of the window, then left the apartment forever.

By now, eight years after Angie and David gotten married, she had a new boyfriend, Keeth Paul, sound engineer for pop group the Heartbreakers, who was living with her in Switzerland, where she was funded by the $35,000 annual allowance David was paying her, in addition to her rent, travel and almost all her other expenses, which he paid.

London
Sunday Mirror
journalist Tony Robinson traveled to Switzerland, where Angie and Keeth were staying in a nine-bedroom rented chalet near David’s home in Blonay. Just back from a trip to America, Angie had arranged for six-year-old Zowie to spend time with David in Berlin, but was now hell-bent on getting full-time custody of him.

When Robinson arrived at the chalet, he found Angie in a dreadful state. “She was nearly senseless,” he recalled. “A few hours later, at about 4
A.M.
., she got out of bed and locked herself in one of the chalet’s nine bathrooms, and took sleeping tablets and tranquillizers.

“Then, before they took effect, she went on the rampage around the house, breaking ornaments and glassware—particularly in the room used by Zowie’s Scots nanny.”

After Keeth Paul tried to calm her down, “she hit him a crippling
blow on the kneecap with a heavy rolling pin. In the kitchen she picked up a steel carving knife and tried to summon the courage to fall on it,” Robinson said.

Tony and Keeth managed to coax her into getting some sleep, but the following morning, Angie “got out of bed, smashed the glass shade of a standard lamp outside her bedroom, and threw herself down stairs to the basement.

“We found her in a crumpled heap with her face swollen and covered in blood,” Robinson said.

“I just couldn’t take anymore . . . I wanted to top myself . . . I thought,
What the hell
,” Angie said afterward.

S
oon after, David asked Angie for a divorce, and she agreed, granting him custody of Zowie, claiming that she knew she would not have been awarded custody, as David had Polaroids of her having sex with a woman. As a settlement, David paid her $750,000 in 1980, while she agreed to a ten-year gag order forbidding her to talk to the media about him and their marriage. But apart from a brief meeting with David in Lausanne, where he signed their divorce papers, she never saw him again.

Afterward, Angie would claim that she had wanted to put up a fight and claim custody of Zowie, but that attorneys dissuaded her. “David had money. Zowie was with him. I thought Zowie was better off with David than with me, initially,” was one of her rationales.

The union of Angie and David Bowie, once mirror images of each other—both young and ambitious, androgynous and anarchic, each completely in tune with the other—had come to an end with a bang, followed by a lifetime of whimpers from Angie. Only a year after accepting David’s $750,000 and agreeing not to talk to the press about him, Angie promptly broke the gag order and published her first autobiography,
Free Spirit
, written with show business journalist
Don Short, who flew to Los Angeles and interviewed her in depth about her life and about David.

“She was bitter, and felt that she had been short-changed and that what she had done for him professionally hadn’t been recognized; but she still said that she admired him,” Short said.

And even at the end of her second memoir,
Backstage Passes
, Angie looked back at her life with David with a degree of positivity and paid him this tribute: “Regardless of his performance with me, David did do a wonderful job of broadcasting sexual freedom and personal liberation. He shone his light into a lot of dark places in people and helped them see themselves, and maybe love themselves a little better.”

David, however, was not so sanguine about Angie. Describing “the maternal side” of Zowie’s life as tragic, he went on to crack of her, “It was like living with a blow-torch,” and, “She has as much insight into the human condition as a walnut and a self-interest that would make Narcissus green with envy.”

In Berlin, with Coco by his side, David did his utmost to build a home for Zowie, and did all he could to make up for the lost years. By the time Zowie was ten, David had, for the most part, kicked drink and drugs and had morphed into a relatively conventional father, taking Zowie to the movies, and on tour with him, where the boy was watched over by the roadies when David was performing.

Finally, in an attempt, perhaps, to restore some routine to Zowie’s life, David went so far as to send Zowie (who went on to change his name to Joey when he was twelve, simply because he wanted to be known by a regular name at last), to the spartan Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun, which Prince Charles had attended.

And while Joey, who quickly revised his nickname to Joe, submitted to the harsh regime at Gordonstoun, he wasn’t particularly happy there, and as an adult described himself as “a sensitive child,” who needed “a few more hugs.”

For though Angie did telephone him repeatedly at Gordonstoun, she was off on her own adventures and wasn’t around to give her son
love and tenderness. In July 1980, with her then lover, punk musician Andrew Lipka, who performed under the name Drew Blood, she had a daughter, Stacia. After Angie’s father helped wean her off drugs, he and her mother both died in 1983, leaving Angie bereft and living in reduced circumstances in Greenwich Village. Joe did visit her there when he was thirteen years old, but after he commented on how she was living, she rounded on him and yelled that he was “bourgeois.”

From that time on, Angie’s letters to Joe at Gordonstoun (where he would remain for five years) remained unopened, and Joe never saw Angie again. “She’s a woman who didn’t have a very positive effect on my upbringing, so I think it was the right move,” Zowie, now calling himself Duncan, asserted to Caroline Graham of the
Mail on Sunday
in August 2009.

For the past twenty years, Angie Bowie has been living with electrical engineer Michael Gassett, who is nearly two decades her junior.

In contrast to Angie’s track record as a parent, from the time when David assumed full custody of Joe, he transformed himself into a committed and strict father, a dramatic change—but then, change has always been the essence of David Bowie.

Ironically, in keeping with a natural fatherly desire to protect his son from the pitfalls he’d faced along the way in the ultimate expression of “do as I say, not as I do,” David took Joey to see Johnny Rotten, then on tour in Switzerland—and afterward, Joe dyed his hair alternately silver, red, and blue. When David saw him, he erupted with, “Joey, you don’t think I’m going to go out with you looking like—”

Whereupon Joe just looked at David and said, “Dad. . . .”

“And it suddenly hit me,” David confessed, adding, “It was momentarily hard to deal with.”

In 1993, during an interview in
Arena
with Tony Parsons, David looked back at his relationship with his son and confessed, “I didn’t give him enough time until 1975. Then I took over from that point as father and parent. Up until that point his nanny had been his mother. His real mother was in and out of his life. And it was a pretty rotten
childhood, I think. Probably one of the most major regrets of my life is that I didn’t spend enough time with him when he was really young.”

In contrast, Joe—who began going by Duncan when he was eighteen years old—seems to bear no resentment toward David for his early neglect of him. Although he claims to have been grumpy, confused, and upset in his twenties, after being asked to leave Gordonstoun at the age of eighteen because he fell asleep in an examination, he studied philosophy, then went to the London Film School and worked his way up to becoming a director, winning multiple awards for his film,
Moon
.

Supportive of David and full of love for him, Duncan doesn’t harbor a shred of bitterness towards his father for the past, “ ’He’s just a wonderful guy and father and I think he understands that I’m a creative person in my own right. He gave me the time and the support to find my feet and the confidence to do what I do,” he said.

On September 16, 1977, David suffered the end of one of his oldest relationships when Marc Bolan was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-nine. A month earlier, David had performed on Marc’s TV show, and he was devastated by his friend’s untimely death. At his funeral, he sat behind Dana Gillespie and cried.

Marc Bolan died just before his son Rolan’s birthday. And because Marc wasn’t married to Rolan’s mother, the boy was left in dire circumstances. David, who was Marc’s godfather, paid for his education and other expenses.

“David’s generosity helped my mother and me to survive,” Rolan Bolan said. “It wasn’t just the financial help, but the time and kindness. He kept in regular touch by phone, and his first and last words every time were: ‘Don’t hesitate to tell me if there is anything I can do.’ He’d shrug off our thanks, saying it was the least he could do for the family of a good friend.”

I
n September 1977, David managed to pry himself away from Berlin and fly to London, where he cut two of the most successful Christmas duets ever recorded—“The Little Drummer Boy” and “Peace on Earth” with Bing Crosby. Bing was in London at the time, touring, and David—along with Twiggy—guested on Bing’s Christmas special, which aired on November 30, 1977. The gig was a radical departure for David, who, when he arrived at the studio, announced that he hated “The Little Drummer Boy,” and asked if he could sing something else—hence he also sang “Peace on Earth” on the special.

David was thirty years old to Bing’s seventy-three, and fans and critics alike were surprised that David had appeared on the show. Somewhat ingeniously, he explained his duet with Crosby away by saying that he’d decided to appear in the show “only because my mum liked him.” Given that he and Peggy had been at loggerheads for years, his explanation sounds hollow, to say the least. Living in the Beckenham apartment that David had purchased for her, with only his gold records and awards to remind her of his fame and fortune, Peggy was bitter and alone. Guilty that she had allowed her son Terry to be committed to a state asylum, Cane Hill, in nearby Coulsden after the family curse of schizophrenia had struck him, Peggy left much of his care to her younger sister, Pat. As for David, Peggy was heard to snap, “He owes me,” and she accepted his monthly allowance without a great deal of gratitude.

B
ack in Berlin, David was rattled when an art dealer approached him and, clearly assuming that he was a Hitler fan, tried to sell him a bust of Hitler. David was outraged, and even more so when, one day, walking past the Wall in West Berlin, he came upon graffiti depicting his name entwined with a swastika. Whether or not he had become associated with Hitler because of the notorious photograph of him
giving the Hitler salute, or because he had purchased Goebbels’s desk and had mentioned that he wanted to make a biopic of Goebbels’s life, is not on record. But as famous as he was, and always would be, it remained virtually impossible for him to erase the ripple effect of the negative press coverage of his salute from the Mercedes.