Bowie (27 page)

Berlin’s history, past and present, continued to play on his mind. And on the anniversary of the Wall’s erection, he happened to be at a punk club, where a birthday cake replica of the Wall was on display. “And as midnight struck, all these punks just started lunging into the cake, rooting pieces out of it. I wished I had a camera. I had never seen anything like it,” he said afterward.

David had recorded “Heroes” at Hansa Studio, just five hundred yards from the Wall, in full view of armed guards and barbed wire. Afterwards, Tony Visconti, who produced the track, joked, “The band played it with so much energy, I think they [the band] wanted to go home, actually.”

But while David and Eno’s rousing anthem “Heroes” was purported to be about two lovers separated from one another because of the Berlin Wall, the truth happened to be that David chanced to see Visconti and singer Antonia Maass walking hand in hand in the shadow of the Wall. When Tony and Antonia got back to the studio in the midst of recording, David and Coco told them that they had seen them walking by the Wall, and, inspired by that vision, then and there, David sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Heroes.”

“I am totally a creature of environment,” he once said. “My albums are expressions of, reflections of, that environment. ‘Heroes’ certainly is, and you have to understand that to understand the album and the music at all.”

 FIFTEEN 

JUST A GIGOLO

O
n the evening of July 1, 1978, in the Royal Box of London’s Earls Court auditorium, Peggy Jones was thumbing through the program for David’s
Isolar II
world tour when the door of the private box opened, and there was David.

He’d stayed away from her for so long, had been so out of touch that, for a moment, the voluble Peggy was tongue-tied.

“You didn’t have to come up here to see me,” she said, finally.

“You’re my mum,” he said, without any hesitation.

That he had invited her to the show was naturally a given, but that he had taken the trouble to greet her himself was quite another story. He had proffered his mother an olive branch from afar. Now, however, he had upped the ante by making the effort to come to see her face-to-face, taking a tentative first step toward the kind of acceptance that only age and experience seem to draw out of families. The reunion, however, did not herald a new closeness between David and Peggy, but it was a start.

British TV personality Janet Street-Porter was on hand at Earls Court that night to interview David. He had invited her because he was impressed by her brassy burgundy hair. Beforehand, he stipulated
that the interview be filmed while they walked from his dressing room to the stage, so that the screaming fans would be seen in the background.

“Bowie was charming, softly spoken, and completely captivating, although he said absolutely nothing of note,” Street-Porter said years later, highlighting the fact that despite the intervening years, David, the son of public relations maven John Jones, still remained the boy who had studied the craft of PR at Ken Pitt’s feet. With his slick, polished British manners, and perhaps partly aping the tactics of Dr. Goebbels, whose desk he owned, David effortlessly retained every iota of control possible over his own image.

S
till living in Berlin and completely out of touch with London life, David continued to cleave to his new existence in Germany.

“I ended up in Berlin. It makes it a very good place for someone like me to live, because I can be incredibly anonymous. They don’t seem particularly joyful about seeing a famous face,” he said.

He still retained his Swiss home outside Geneva, and it was there that actor-turned-director of
Blow-Up,
David Hemmings, went to visit him in the hopes of persuading him to play the part of a young, jaded Prussian officer who comes back to Berlin after the First World War, finds himself alienated from everything around him, and, in despair, resorts to becoming a gigolo, working for a sinister baroness, who the producers hoped would be played by none other than Marlene Dietrich, one of David’s idols, a cabaret star par excellence, a Hollywood siren and, perhaps equally important, a woman who had pioneered both bisexuality and open marriage in her own private life.

When Hemmings flew to Switzerland to meet with David, Hemmings was instantly captivated by him. As he wrote in his autobiography, “He was, as I had expected, hugely stimulating to deal with—clever, funny, original, and with a very special natural elegance. . . . Bowie,
thank God, was fascinated by the character he had to play. He was anxious to delve into the persona of the gigolo, the male heterosexual hooker—a type he had always found somewhat inscrutable and difficult to get to know. And the role allowed him to show the sensual side of his nature, which hadn’t been possible in his last film,
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, where his character didn’t have any genitals!”

Relatively charmed by Hemmings—but even more so by the fact that, as he later said, “Marlene was dangled in front of me”—David decided to negotiate his own contract. But when he arrived at Hemmings’s office, according to coexecutive producer Joshua Sinclair, who told the story to Charlotte Chandler for her biography of Marlene, David slammed his hand on the table and declared that he wanted $250,000 to play the part, plus 5 percent of the French box office earnings.

Stunned, Joshua agreed on the spot, and David said, “Good. Write up the contract,” and walked out.

After a great deal of negotiation, Marlene, too, agreed to play the role of “the Baroness” in
Just a Gigolo
.

The sole reason why Marlene, then in her late seventies and, since the death of her husband, Rudolf Sieber, living in Paris as a recluse, decided to accept the part of the baroness in
Just a Gigolo
was the $250,000 fee for just two days’ work. Nonetheless, Dietrich, cannily playing to David’s youthful fan base, declared, “I’m happy David Bowie is in the movie. It’s interesting for me because he wrote the song ‘Kreuzberg.’ ” Kreuzberg is a district of Berlin, the town where Dietrich was born, and with which her name was synonymous.

D
avid’s contract to appear in the movie had been long since signed when he learned that Marlene categorically refused to come to Berlin to shoot the movie with him. Instead, she demanded that her scenes with him be shot in Berlin from his perspective, and that the same scene then be shot from Marlene’s perspective—separately, in Paris,
ensuring that the two of them would never appear together in any of the scenes.

Marlene’s refusal to leave her apartment at 12, avenue Montaigne, Paris, close to the Arc de Triomphe and the House of Dior, where she had often purchased the couture clothes she wore with such panache, shouldn’t have been a surprise to Hemmings, or even to David himself. Her iconic glittering beauty now a faded memory, her legendary legs—which had once been insured for one million dollars—swollen, her balance precarious, Marlene, who had dedicated her life to perfecting the legend of Dietrich, was not about to allow her cherished image to be exposed to the harsh light of day.

Moreover, she was also aware that her appearance in Berlin, once the heart of Hitler’s Germany, the country she had abandoned when he came to power, could give rise to violent demonstrations against her, particularly as she had moved to the United States and devoted herself to entertaining the Allied troops during the war. Not only that, but sixteen years before, she had made her last movie, Stanley Kramer’s
Judgment at Nuremberg
, starring as the widow of a German general, and a woman virulently opposed to Nazism.

For Marlene it was clear that traveling to Berlin to film
Just a Gigolo
was out of the question—the filming must come to her, she decided, and her scenes must be filmed in Paris, without her performing with David, face-to-face. Naturally, David had been intent on meeting the legendary Marlene Dietrich, the ultimate symbol of sexual androgyny, a woman whose lovers were as varied as his own (ranging, as they did, from John Wayne to Edith Piaf), and a fellow Capricorn, the sign under which he was proud of being born. When he learned that she would not be filming with him in Berlin, he was gutted.

After filming began, initially unaware of David’s disappointment at not meeting Marlene, David Hemmings was unendingly enthusiastic about his performance. “He had a face that always looked beautiful on camera: he didn’t have any bad angles, which, as it happened, posed a problem on this film,” Hemmings remembered. “We went to
a lot of trouble to make him look filthy and down-and-out, buying the scruffiest clothes we could find, but as soon as he put them on, they became an elegant new look.

“We laughed about it a lot—the ‘Gardening Look’ in wellies, baggy old cords, tatty sweaty, and a cloth cap. When I wore it, I looked like a gardener: when Bowie wore it, he looked like the front cover of
Vogue
,” Hemmings said.

Kim Novak was David’s other costar in the movie, and he would dance a steamy tango with her.

“A splendid woman. She oozes femininity, doesn’t she? Happily married, though,” he said of Kim, and, instead, turned his attentions to Sydne Rome, a diminutive American blond actress he’d first met the year before, in Paris, where they had discussed her appearing in his proposed movie on the Austrian artist Egon Schiele.

Beguiled by Sydne, David invited her to accompany him to the French premiere of
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, and for a time, they were inseparable. However, Sydne’s blond beauty wasn’t her only attraction for David. Then one of Europe’s rising stars, a rival to Maria Schneider of
Last Tango in Paris
fame, Sydne also must have appealed to the synthesizer of contacts in David. As a twenty-one-year-old aspiring actress from Sandusky, Ohio, she was discovered by director Roman Polanski, who cast her in his movie
What?
and promoted her as a latter-day cinematic Cinderella.

What?
featured Sydne in a daring seminude scene, and after working with the prestigious Polanski, she topped that by making a movie directed by the distinguished Réne Clément. In short, Sydne was a conduit to Polanski and Clément, if only by association, and thus was irresistible to David.

Nonetheless, he wasn’t about to restrict himself to one woman. At his invitation, Winona Williams flew to Berlin to be with him during the making of
Just a Gigolo
and remembered, “David and I had dinner with Sydne Rome. She was a little bitch and tried to goad me into some intellectual tête-a-tête, trying to show me up.”

Coco, too, was hostile to Winona. “Although she brought me coffee and orange juice in bed, she also sat at the kitchen table and told me how I wasn’t right for David, and that Bianca Jagger was more suited to him,” Winona said. “But I never took her seriously because she was definitely in love with him and manipulated situations to get women out of his life.”

However, Coco didn’t succeed in banishing Winona from David’s life. As Winona remembered, “I loved David very much, and he prided himself on mentoring me, and left little notes around for me to ponder, like ‘Never handle more power than you are capable of controlling.’ For my birthday, he brought me a limited edition of the occultist Austin Osman Spare’s book
The Book of Pleasure (Self Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy
and inscribed it with, ‘Winona Happy Birthday 1999 love from me.’ I really did love David very much, but being with him was very draining. He seems to be able to extract energy from people, and whenever I was around him for more than a few days, I would feel so drained. I don’t know how he did it, but I would literally have to leave to refuel my own fire. He managed to touch and take from every fiber of my being,” Winona said, explaining why she left Berlin and ended her relationship with David.

D
espite the fact that Marlene wouldn’t shoot any scenes with him, David was still determined to meet her, so he announced to coexecutive producer Joshua Sinclair that when Marlene was scheduled to shoot her scenes in Paris, he intended to fly there, along with a photographer, and pose for photographs with her anyway. Floored for a moment, Joshua rallied, and, aware that David was due to perform at a major rock concert in Australia on April 4, maneuvered it so that the Marlene shoot would be switched to exactly that date.