Bowie (30 page)

“It simply was a terrible script,” he said, forthrightly. “I saw little reason for spending so long on something that bad . . . And I told them so. I don’t think anyone had turned down a ‘major’ role in a Bond before. It really didn’t go down too well at all. They were very tetchy about it.”

However, later on he added, “To be honest, I haven’t watched a James Bond film since Sean Connery was in them. I don’t really like them.”

On the other hand, he did agree to appear as himself in Ben Stiller’s
Zoolander
, judging the script, “too funny a script to walk past. An absolute hoot,” and also did a cameo playing a hit man, complete with mustache, who jams his gun into Jeff Goldblum’s mouth in John Landis’s
Into the Night
. That same year, he played Vendice Partners, an adman, in
Absolute Beginners
, modeling his transatlantic twang on that of his boss at Nevin D. Hirst during his advertising agency years. “I enjoyed playing him. He’s such a bastard,” David said.

The movie’s director, Julien Temple, had worked with him before on a video and was extremely impressed by him. “Bowie’s not only very interested in film, but he has a lot of knowledge about it,” he said. “I get a lot of input from him, which is very different from working with the Stones, who always want you to do everything yourself.”

Appearing in
Absolute Beginners
, in the part of Flora, was Mandy Rice-Davies, who hadn’t seen David since their lunch together at La Gioconda, almost twenty years before. “We didn’t have a scene together, but David came round to my dressing room and said, ‘Do you remember me? Do you remember the Gioconda?’ ” Mandy said. “He hadn’t changed at all. I went on the set and watched him. He was still a very self-confident young man.”

Patsy Kensit, the female star of the movie, was eighteen years old and utterly unraveled at the prospect of working with David. “I was beyond excited about that and expected him to instantly fall in love with me the moment he laid eyes on me (as you do when you’re eighteen),” she remembered. “There’s a brilliant scene in the film where David dances on top of a globe, and on the day it was being shot, the soundstage at Shepperton was packed because everyone wanted to watch him perform. We were all in awe of him, and he was amazing,” Patsy said.

He was a big star now, both of movies and of music, but somewhere inside, he still remained the romantic sixteen-year-old boy who
had once wooed a fourteen-year-old girl, Dana Gillespie. Through the intervening years, he never forgot the secret of his success.

“One day, I was sitting in the makeup chair. And he walked over to me, picked up a hairbrush, and started brushing my hair. He didn’t utter a single word, just put down the brush after he’d finished and left the room,” Patsy Kensit said.

 SIXTEEN 

ASHES

O
n January 16, 1985, David’s forty-seven-year-old half brother, Terry Burns, lay down on the railroad tracks, just yards in front of an oncoming express train then traveling at a speed of seventy miles an hour toward Coulsdon South station. It was too late for the engineer to brake, and all ten carriages rolled over Terry’s body and crushed him to death.

For Terry’s funeral, David, who had stayed away, ostensibly because he was afraid of all the press who might stampede the funeral, sent a basket of yellow and pink chrysanthemums along with a card that read “You’ve seen more things than we could imagine but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain. God bless you. —David.”

During David’s childhood and teens, Terry had exposed him to jazz, to coffee bars, to Soho, to subversive literature, and—as Terry was prone to smashing seats in the Astoria Brixton—to bad-boy rock-star behavior, as well. However, any nascent violence in Terry was not due to willfulness or a desire to rebel for rebellion’s sake, but to his mental and emotional instability. Back in December 1966, David and Terry had gone to a Cream concert at the Bromel Club together,
and there, David witnessed his brother’s paranoid schizophrenia in full flower.

“I know that he was getting to a pretty tranced-out state watching Cream, because I don’t think he had ever been to something as loud as that in his life. I remember having to take him home because it was really affecting him,” David said in a 1993 interview on BBC Radio One.

He had always been concerned about Terry, cared about him, and had even taken Dana Gillespie with him to visit Terry at Cane Hill. But it was Angie who had shown Terry unlimited kindness, and who, in 1971, invited him to stay at Haddon Hall with her and David, leaving David perplexed.

“I’m not sure whether he’s kinda run away or what. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution. As for my brother, he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much,” David said at the time.

Terry’s idyllic sojourn at Haddon Hall was not destined to last long, and before, during, and after, as Angie revealed in her memoirs, David continued to be terrified that he might follow in Terry’s footsteps. Incarcerated in Cane Hill asylum, Coulsdon, Surrey, where his mother, Peggy, had committed him, in 1982, Terry tried to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window. He survived with a broken arm and leg and ended up in Mayday Hospital, Croydon, just seven miles away from Beckenham.

Hearing the news, David made a surprise visit to Terry, bringing with him gifts of a radio/cassette player, some books, and cigarettes. More important, he promised to get Terry released from Cane Hill. But no matter what David may or may not have attempted to do for Terry behind the scenes, Terry remained where he was. Around the same time, outraged by what she perceived to be David’s neglect of Terry, whom she loved as if he were her own son, David’s aunt Pat gave a series of interviews to Leni and Peter Gillman, then writing their biography
Alias David Bowie.

“Pat talked to us because she was angry at David and wanted to get his attention. Terry was passionate about David, and David used to worship Terry, but when he became famous, it appeared to Pat that he wanted to put his relationship with his brother behind him,” Leni Gillman said. “Pat felt that Terry was being harmed by David’s neglect, and she hoped that by talking to us and giving the family perspective, it might cause David to put it right.

“Terry would say that ‘David said he was going to come and see me,’ ‘David said he was going to do this or that,’ but then nothing happened. David did write Terry some letters, but Peggy had probably told Terry that David was going to do this or that. She was giving Terry false hope, but I imagine she did it in good faith and she thought that David would do those things,” Leni said.

In December 1984, Terry made a second suicide attempt by throwing himself in the path of an oncoming express train. But just as the train roared closer and closer, he jumped out of the way. Then, before anyone could stop him, he grabbed a massive number of sleeping pills out of his pocket and swallowed them.

That suicide attempt failed. But on his next attempt, made just three weeks afterward, Terry succeeded in killing himself.

“Terry had such a bright mind and it was just awful that he would deteriorate like that,” David said afterward, and went on to muse as to whether or not he would one day suffer the same fate, relating his drug use to “attempting to be my brother.” It was an easy rationale, one that sat well with the press and didn’t give a glimmer of what David, who grew up worshiping Terry, really felt about his half brother’s suicide.

However, his aunt Pat would never forgive him for Terry’s incarceration and untimely death. As she confided in journalist Amanda Cable seven years after Terry’s suicide, David’s neglect of Terry had run so deep that even though she had repeatedly written to him to beg for cash so that Terry could be transferred from the grim Cane Hill asylum to a gentler, more luxurious private clinic, David did not.

“He left Terry for nineteen years in a mental home without sending a penny for private treatment,” Pat said. Then, in a moment of insight, she added, “Terry was handsome, charming, and intelligent. But when he fell ill David didn’t want to know, because it was a reminder that the same thing could happen to him because it ran in the family.”

I
n 1985, David performed at Live Aid, for which he initially intended to do a transatlantic duet with Mick Jagger. However, after deciding that the logistics were against them, David proposed that they do a duet with one of them singing from inside a space shuttle and the other one singing down on earth. Unsurprisingly, NASA was not prepared to lend them a space shuttle, so Mick and David recorded “Dancing in the Street” together. Originally, their duet was supposed to be live, with one of them in Philadelphia and the other in London, but the idea was scuppered owing to technical problems.

Consequently, the duet was recorded in London’s Docklands, with just Mick and David, alone, and there was a strong homoerotic vibe to the taping. Although David was happy with the first take, Mick was not. Throughout the whole process, David was friendly to the musicians and anyone else on set, but Mick was not. Nonetheless, David and Mick’s rendition of “Dancing in the Street” hit number one on the UK charts and stayed there for four weeks.

Kevin Armstrong, who put together David’s Live Aid band, felt extremely positive about David and observed, “I don’t think he’s quite so Machiavellian as people make out, or so calculating. . . . He has quite a sort of boyish enthusiasm for something and he’ll just follow it.”

David ended his Live Aid performance by introducing “Heroes” and dedicating it “to my son, to all our children, and to the children of the world,” and was met with tumultuous applause.

To some outsiders, it might have seemed as if David and Mick’s rivalry was still in full flower, but they had shared so much, even the same women, and by now were friends—so much so that Mick and Jerry invited David and Coco to spend Christmas with them at their Mustique estate. Captivated by the beauty of the island, and by the privacy, David immediately bought a plot of land close by and set about commissioning architects and designers to work on building his Caribbean paradise.

Apart from being a bastion of billionaires, blue bloods, and superstars, Mustique is also dominated by classic Caribbean architecture, and although David did follow in Mick’s footsteps by purchasing a property there, as much a nonconformist as ever, he said, “I wanted something as unlike the Caribbean as possible,” and designed and commissioned an Indonesian-style estate, high on a hill, with lush Japanese gardens dominated by koi ponds, a swimming pool cut into the hill, and romantically beautiful Balinese pavilions. When work on the estate was completed, David was so happy with the result that he declared in an interview with
Architectural Digest
, “My ambition is to make music so incredibly uncompromised that I will have absolutely no audience left whatsoever. Then I’ll be able to spend the entire year on the island of Mustique.”

Whenever Joe spent his vacations in Mustique with his father, it was akin to paradise. “I’d go to Basil’s Bar, eat some banana bread, eat some lobster, watch films, have a swim. The whole Jagger clan would be down there,” he recalled.

During much of the eighties, David and Joe shared their spells on Mustique with the new love in David’s life, the beautiful Melissa Hurley, who is twenty years his junior. They first met when David’s Glass Spider tour hit L.A., and Melissa was one of the dancers in the show.

Born in Vermont, Melissa, then twenty to David’s forty, was a statuesque, elegant ballet dancer, a soloist with the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet. Beautiful, with long legs and a talent for doing the splits effortlessly, she had show business in her blood. Not only did she dance the
tango in the movie
Rent
, but later on, in 1990, she also costarred with Steve Martin in
My Blue Heaven
.

With Melissa, an all-American girl with style, class, and good manners, David experienced a relatively conventional relationship. And although he had been dallying with Hawaiian model Marie Helvin and English aristocrat Sabrina Guinness (whom he invited to Wimbledon, and to Mick Jagger’s birthday party for his then girlfriend, Jerry Hall), he gradually settled into a more regular way of life with Melissa. Careful not to expose her to too much publicity, he made sure that they never arrived at or left a restaurant together. Consequently, they were very rarely photographed in tandem.