Bowie (33 page)

Offering specific shades of foundation formulated for African-American, Asian, Latina, and other women of varying ethnicities, Iman’s company was such a runaway success that in 2010 it was a $25 million business. Moreover, in 2007, Home Shopping Network invited Iman to create her own clothing line, which she later expanded with accessories, all with great success, winning her fans and customers among women of all ages.

 EIGHTEEN 

GOLDEN YEARS

D
avid was happy and content with Iman, and although he had stepped down his work considerably, he still pursued an eclectic array of artistic projects. In an utterly radical departure from his image and from the world of rock music, in April 1995 he made a deal with the flowery British fabric and fashion company Laura Ashley to design a range of wallpaper.

As he explained, “I chose wallpaper because of its status as something extremely incongruous, particularly in the world of art. I haven’t completely lost my sense of irony, you know!”

The wallpaper was only on sale in a limited edition at the London gallery where a retrospective of his paintings was on exhibition. In the midst of it all, he nevertheless retained a sense of humor: “Hanging wallpaper isn’t my kind of thing, but I could definitely art direct, and I could light it beautifully. I could tell other people how to hang it, believe you me,” he said.

Meanwhile, in September 1995, Brian Eno produced David’s
Outside
album, on which David sang in a series of different voices. That same month, he co-headlined an American tour with Nine Inch Nails called the Outside tour, which bred a million-dollar-selling album and
won him the Lifetime Achievement award at the Brits, which was presented to him by then prime minister Tony Blair.

Morrissey briefly toured with Bowie, but their relationship had never been smooth or trouble-free. In his autobiography, Morrissey remembered meeting David for breakfast at a Beverly Hills restaurant and being horrified that David was about to eat some cold cuts. Whereupon, he asked, “ ‘David, you’re not actually going to eat that stuff, are you?’ Rumbled, he snaps, ‘Oh you must be HELL to live with.’ ‘Yes, I am,’ I say proudly, as David changes course and sidles off towards the fruit salad and another soul is saved from the burning fires of self-imposed eternal damnation.”

On a different note, Morrissey revealed, “David quietly tells me, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.’ ” Down the line, according to Morrissey, David telephoned and asked him to cover “Mr. Ed,” a recent song of his. According to Morrissey, “He stresses that if I don’t do the cover, ‘I will never speak to you again, haha,’ which is hardly much of a loss since David doesn’t ever speak to me.

“A few months later I am at my mother’s house when the telephone rings. My mother hands me the 1940s shellac antique. ‘It’s for you—it’s David Bowie,’ and boyhood’s fire is all aglow again, although I cannot understand how David found my mother’s number.

“He explains that he would like to send me something through the post. ‘Do you have an address?’ I ask. ‘Oh, just write to me care of the management,’ he replies. ‘No, I meant do YOU have an address for ME?’ I say.”

Iman did not always travel with David, or see his shows, simply because, as she put it, “How many times can you hear the same songs?” Alone on the
Outside
tour, David telephoned Iman regularly and also stayed in touch with friends and fellow musicians.

During the Outside tour, as Eno remembered in his diary, “Bowie called me from a distant American hotel room to relay the O. J. Simpson verdict to me as it was delivered, describing the scene in court, etc.
Then it was on our TV too, so we were watching it together. I don’t know what city he was in—Detroit, I think.”

David was deeply unnerved by the trial verdict. Eno quoted him as saying, “It’s all down to investigative journalism now.”

On the movie front, David agreed to appear in Julian Schnabel’s
Basquiat
, playing the part of Andy Warhol. When they had first met, Andy had failed to take him seriously, had rejected him, and David couldn’t have failed to note the irony. “God knows what he would have thought of me actually playing him in a film all those years later. We never particularly got on,” he said, later adding, “I’m not sure that there’s such a thing as a fond memory of Andy Warhol. He was a strange fish. Even people who say they knew him well, I don’t think they did. I certainly didn’t know him well.”

Intent on portraying Andy in every aspect, he borrowed his clothes, including Andy’s handbag and its contents, from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. When the film was released in August 1996, he received positive reviews, with no less a luminary than Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
praising his performance with, “Andy Warhol . . . is brilliantly caricatured by David Bowie as an art world Wizard of Oz.”

Julian Schnabel observed, “I thought it was like a doppelgänger thing, where I have a pop icon play a pop icon. So you know you’re watching David Bowie in a sense, but it’s almost like, ‘Is Andy Warhol playing David Bowie, or is David Bowie playing Andy Warhol?’ ”

There was, of course, a third possibility: Perhaps David Bowie was playing David Bowie playing Andy Warhol.

In 1998, again in stark Bowie contrast, David played a gang leader in
Everybody Loves Sunshine
, simply because Goldie, whose script it was, had asked him.

In 1997, David made a return to solo albums with
Black Tie White Noise
, which included “The Wedding,” inspired by Iman, and “Feel Free,” on which he reunited with Mick Ronson after twenty years. Just a short time after they recorded the song, Mick died of liver cancer at the age of just forty-six. Afterward, David would say, “Of all the early-seventies
guitarists, Mick was probably one of the most influential and profound and I miss him a lot.”

In 1997, now without Mick, he released his new album,
Earthling
, posing on the cover in a tattered Union Jack Coat, which he codesigned with Alexander McQueen. That same year, in a strikingly innovative move, one that was quintessentially David, mixing the visionary with the mercenary as it did, he issued $55 million of Bowie bonds, selling shares in back royalties of his twenty-five albums recorded before 1990, in return for an up-front payment. Investors would then be able to buy and sell “Bowie Bonds” which promised an annual 7.9 percent return.

“I just wanted the money. I couldn’t give a damn who bought them,” said David, then revealed that all the bonds had been purchased by Prudential Insurance. “I am very proud of what I’ve written and I’ve created. And I’m quite happy to earn my living by it. The money doesn’t present me with any embarrassment. Basically, I do the art and sell it,” he said. “I have a lot of money coming in over the next ten years from my back catalogue, but I’d rather have the cash now and not have to wait.”

Similarly, on the real estate front, in January 1996, primarily because Iman was never happy in the rarefied atmosphere of Mustique, David sold his estate there to businessman Felix Dennis for $400,000 less than the $4 million at which he originally put it on the market.

A
s always, uncannily forward thinking, intellectually searching, and continually alert for the next trend, the next world-shaking innovation, even at the early stage in the general use of the Internet, David was already ahead of the curve. He plunged in heart and soul, carried a portable computer everywhere, and, a full two years before e-mail became a popular form of communication, used it as much as possible.
An e-mail addict at a time when only a small number of Americans had it, he enthused, “I’d be completely lost without it! I always like to e-mail quick messages to Iman if I know she is out for the day. But I still call her on the telephone if we are away from each other for any length of time.”

Every morning when he got up, he invariably logged on, posting diaries of his thoughts and activities, and even entering chat rooms under a pseudonym. “I don’t announce myself when I go into my chat rooms, but I do have a pet name which they know as ‘Sailor’! As in ‘Hello, Sailor.’ I just couldn’t resist it,” he revealed in an interview with Richard Wallace, which David insisted be conducted over the Internet.

“I love the chat rooms, because you get to hear what people genuinely think,” he said. “The communication between me and my web audience has become more intimate than it’s ever been. It is a feeling I enjoy because it is new to me. It is adventurous, it is a new position of what the artist is, it is a demystification.”

David being David, he threw himself into exploring the Wild West of the Internet with a vengeance. “I was an obsessive, I’d surf the web all the time, just crazed,” he admitted afterward.

However, after six months, he made the decision to cut down on his time surfing the Internet, “because I was on too much. Iman wasn’t too happy because I just never came to bed. But now I’m very disciplined,” he said. Then, in a comment that prefigured the cataclysmic effect of the Internet on relationships ten or fifteen years later, he added, “Once you start surfing at night, you can really break up a relationship. You’ve got to be very careful about that.”

By the end of the nineties he had launched what the
Economist
called “a creative empire.” Apart from signing a special edition Mini car, he had his own radio network on
Rolling Stone
’s Internet radio site. Barnesandnoble.com hired him to write online reviews of books, and he shocked the music business establishment by releasing his album
Hours
on the Internet. On September 11, 1996, he released his
track “Telling Lies” exclusively on the Internet through his own site,
Davidbowie.com
, which 350,000 fans downloaded.

Later on, in a 1999 interview, he accurately prophesized, “The exciting part of music on the Internet is the impact it could have on delivery systems. . . . It would be good news for the consumer, too, who by choosing the individual tracks or making a compilation of various artists, would in a sense become the producer.”

Then he went on to warn, “Record companies may resist the web until the last minute before being forced into action. My record company isn’t exactly jumping on board. . . . I think if I was starting out in music now, I think I’d look on rock as a stodgy, traditional format and the Internet as what’s happening tomorrow.”

With that in mind, in September 1998, he launched Bowienet, a high-speed Internet service that offered customers e-mail addresses with the suffix @davidbowie.com, and a multitude of other Bowie-related elements: live chats, live video feeds, chat rooms, and question and answer sessions with David, himself.

Subscribers wishing to use Bowienet as their full Internet service provider paid a fee of $19.95 a month, and users who only wanted to avail themselves of content paid $5.95 a month. A great resource for all things Bowie, the site would survive for fourteen years.

O
n January 7, 1997, David celebrated his fiftieth birthday at Madison Square Garden, where he performed in aid of Save the Children with Lou Reed, Robert Smith, and many others. That same year, he performed at the Phoenix Festival in aid of Amnesty International’s Refugee Campaign in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. And on January 31, 1997, Madonna inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but, predictably, he didn’t bother to show on the night. “I’m not really one for those awards shows,” he commented. “That aspect of competiveness leaves me a little cold.”

Afterward, hearing what Madonna had said about him, he professed to be deeply touched by her words. This is what she said that night: “Before I saw David Bowie live, I was just your normal, dysfunctional, rebellious teenager from the Midwest, and he has truly changed my life.

“I’ve always had a sentimental attachment to David Bowie, not just because I grew up with his music, but it’s because it was the first rock concert that I ever saw and it was a major event in my life. I planned for months to go and see it.

“I was fifteen years old, it was the end of the school year, and leading up to the week of the show, I begged my father and he said, ‘I absolutely refuse, over my dead body, you’re not going there, that’s where horrible people hang out,’ so of course I had to go.