Bowie (34 page)

“So my best friend spent the night at my house and when we thought everyone was asleep, we snuck out of my window, which was no mean feat, as I was wearing my highest platform shoes and a long black silk cape. Don’t ask.

“We couldn’t drive, so we hitchhiked into Detroit and I don’t know who was scarier . . . the drivers that picked us up, or us in our outfits. Anyway, we arrived at Cobo Hall and the place was packed and we fought our way to our seats. And the show began.

“And I don’t think that I breathed for two hours. It was the most amazing show that I’d ever seen, not just because the music was great, but because it was great theater. And here’s this beautiful, androgynous man, just being so perverse . . . as David Byrne so beautifully put it: so unconventional, defying logic and basically blowing my mind.

“Anyway, I came home a changed woman, as you can see, and my father was not sleeping and he knew exactly where I went, and he grounded me for the rest of the summer. But it was worth every minute that I sat and suffered in my house that summer. So I would just like to thank you, David Bowie—wherever you are—for inspiring me and I would like to accept your award. Thank you.”

O
n April 1, 1998, he and Iman hosted a party thrown at artist Jeff Koons’s SoHo studio, launching the book
Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928–1960,
ostensibly a biography by William Boyd. The book was published by David’s new art-house publishing company, 21, and in it, Boyd recounted the tragic story of Tate, who, after destroying 99 percent of his work, jumped off the Staten Island ferry and drowned.

Guests at the party, who all feted author William Boyd and toasted the memory of Nat Tate, included Charlie Rose, Jay McInerney, and assorted art world glitterati, all of whom listened respectfully as David read out an excerpt of the biography. However, a week later,
Independent
art critic David Lister revealed that Nat Tate was only a figment of Boyd’s imagination, and that the book was a hoax in which Bowie willingly and knowingly participated.

In 1999, David signed to make an album,
Hours
, for Virgin Records. Publicist Mick Garbutt worked with him on it and, subsequently, on
Heathen
and then
Reality
. He said, “David’s an absolute gentleman. He’s polite and takes an interest in you. He is generally nice; he disarms you and asks you how you are. But unlike [John] Travolta, who wanted to know everything my mother was doing, David doesn’t go into great depths.

“I’ve met him hundreds of times, and he has a gentleness about him. There is just an aura of otherworldliness about him. Obviously he has got those eyes, he has that look. There is a youthfulness about him, a sharpness.”

At one stage, while David was promoting the album in England, Garbutt traveled up to Manchester, where he met David at BBC Manchester. “When I got there, I realized that I’d got David’s schedule wrong,” Mick remembered. “He knew that I had, but he didn’t say anything to me in front of anyone. It was almost as if he
didn’t want to show me up in front of them, but he was obviously annoyed.

“I apologized to him, and he just nodded. He knew his schedule better than I did and it was a good thing that I rectified my mistake. All of us who work with David feel that we don’t want to get anything wrong. We don’t want to disappoint him. He commands loyalty more than any other artist I know.”

When Garbutt flew to Manhattan to work with David further, he received another insight about him. “I remember I went to a studio on West Broadway, and David just sauntered in, wearing a black flat cap and didn’t have an entourage with him. He was on his own. He’d just walked down West Broadway alone and just turned up at the studio, without any flunkies whatsoever.”

In 1999, David played Wembley for NetAid, and Meg Mathews went with her then husband, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, to see him after the show, and remembered, “I went into his dressing room. We were having a laugh with him; it was very laid-back. I was a bit in awe. Gobsmacked. Noel was chatting away with him. David was very down to earth, really sexy voice, really polite. Gentlemanly, not a massive ego,” she said.

In 1999, David was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the Berklee College of Music and gave a fifteen-minute commencement speech, in which he told the story of John Lennon’s fan-avoidance techniques. The rest of the speech was peppered with his customary wit and stellar advice for musicians of the future.

“Music has given me over forty years of extraordinary experiences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it’s allowed me so many moments of companionship when I’ve been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It’s been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in. I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it graciously offered me,” he said.

On June 25, 2000, David headlined at Glastonbury 2000, performing in front of more than a hundred thousand fans, many of them cold and tired after three days at the festival. David kept them rapt and enthralled. Beforehand, though, he had been, “nervous as a kitten,” but he swaggered through his two-hour show set and gave a masterly superstar performance.

 NINETEEN 

WHERE HE IS NOW

O
n February 13, 2000, David and Iman announced that she was pregnant with their first child. They had been trying since they first got married, and, as David put it, “It’s been a long and patient wait for our baby, but both Iman and I wanted it to be absolutely right and didn’t want to find ourselves working flat-out during the first couple of years of the baby’s life. This is a wonderful time in both our lives.”

In a more jocular vein, he said, “We are looking at names at the moment and all I can tell you is that it will be in keeping with the Somali-Bromley tradition.” Alexandria Zahra Jones was born on August 15, 2000, and weighed in at seven pounds, four ounces. David was in the delivery room and cut the umbilical cord.

With the birth of Lexie, as her parents call her, his thoughts strayed to his own childhood, and to his half brother, Terry. “He was an autodidact. He would go to libraries and art museums and discover music on his own, and he would say, ‘You gotta read these guys,’ and ‘You gotta listen to this.’ I think I’ve passed that on to my son, and I do hope that I will do that for my daughter,” he said.

His relationship with Zowie, now Duncan, had become even closer through the years, particularly as Duncan was exhibiting talent
as a film director, although he had never shown any aptitude as a musician. After working for Jim Henson and attending the London Film School, like his father before him, he took a job in advertising and directed a campaign for French Connection. Despite his fractured childhood and lack of a mother’s consistent love—so much in contrast with what the future held in store for Lexie—Duncan’s creativity had flourished, just as his father had intended.

Apart from nurturing Lexie’s creativity, from the first, David was concerned with practical matters, as well. Getting up before Lexie every morning, although he balked at changing her diapers, he read out loud to her and played with her, taking turns with Iman. He was a proud father and boasted, “Lexie has enormous energy. She’s an absolutely extraordinary, vital child. And incredibly social.” And, “She is wonderful and probably, I believe, the most intelligent child that has ever been born. She is terribly physical and I think she’s mad for anything athletic. Running and dancing and getting bruises. She’s a lovely, lively child.”

Resolving not to tour so much, like he did when Duncan was growing up, he insisted, “I don’t want to make the same mistakes with Lexie.”

At the end of 2000, David made a cameo appearance in
Mr. Rice’s Secret
, a low-budget independent film, playing the small part of Mr. Rice, the kindly neighbor of a small boy suffering from Hodgkin’s disease. As Elvis Mitchell wrote in the
New York Times,
“Someone deserves the grand prize for persuading David Bowie to participate in this minor drama.”

By way of an explanation, David said, “From the script, it was so thoughtfully and considerately conceived. Nothing smacked of the sensational. It could so easily have slipped into that hole given the subject matter. There was an active intelligence behind it all. . . . I have, on the whole, avoided Hollywood like the plague.”

David was in America when, on April 2, 2001, his mother died in a nursing home in St. Albans, England. She was eighty-eight years old,
and her death was sudden and a surprise to him. Since the mid-1980s, she had been spending three months each year at his home in Switzerland. But despite his largesse, true to form, Peggy had complained to her younger sister Pat that he was away for most of the time she had been there.

Whether or not he had ever cared about pleasing his mother, the die had long ago been cast. However, unlike in the case of his half brother, Terry, David did attend his mother’s funeral, where Ken Pitt was in attendance, and so was his errant aunt Pat. Seeing her, David let the past fall away and hugged her as if bygones were bygones. Afterward, he made no comment about his mother, her life or her death.

Peggy had been demanding, flamboyant, unloving, fanciful, a writer of poetry, a stickler for cleanliness and perfect manners, a long-distant, relatively silent supporter of his career, unemotional, unloving and, in many ways, his doppelgänger, his other self. And now she was gone.

If he was suffering from the loss of his mother as he suffered in the wake of Terry’s suicide, David never revealed his feelings, but instead, threw himself into work, as was his wont. He was up in Woodstock with Tony Visconti recording his first album of the new millennium,
Heathen
, when the planes hit the Twin Towers. He saw the news and immediately called Iman in their SoHo apartment just two miles from the World Trade Center. From the apartment, Iman had a full view of the towers but had missed the first attack. She was still on the phone with David when the second plane crashed into the buildings. According to David, “She said, ‘Oh my God, another one has gone.’ I said, ‘You are under attack. Get the fuck out of there.’ ”

With Lexie in the stroller, she ran twenty blocks away from the apartment to shelter and safety in a friend’s apartment. But to David’s horror, after that the phones went down and they lost contact with each other. “I didn’t speak to her until the nighttime,” David remembered.
“I was in a right state. I just had no idea if she and Lexie got out. It was so, so horrifying. It was incredibly traumatic, one of the nastiest days of my life.”

In the wake of September 11, 2001, on October 20, 2001, he performed at a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden: the Concert for New York City, to honor the New York City Fire Department and the New York City Police Department, their families, those lost in the attacks, and those who had worked in rescue and recovery.

A year later, he released the
Reality
album via satellite, the world’s largest interactive event of its time, and then embarked upon the Reality tour. Bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, who had played with him for the last decade, said, “We are starting to find our footing as a band. Of course, as soon as it settles down, David always mixes it up again. He gets bored, so that helps to keep us on our toes.”

Although he was still a bona fide rock star, he underplayed his fame and fortune, dressing in J.Crew, declaring a year later, “I’ve been a pretty regular guy over the past fourteen years, in the way that I live my life and my ambitions, which are very few these days. It’s about trying to keep my family unit together, really to try to create a secure and comforting nucleus for my daughter. If I’m looking further ahead, I’m usually looking through her eyes.”

He had already rejected a life peerage in 2000 (which would have meant that he would have been made a baron for his lifetime, but that the title would not be passed on to his son), and in 2003, he was offered a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II. He rejected that as well, explaining, “I’m indifferent to royalty. I can’t remember the last time I thought about them. So I’m certainly not excited about the prospect of working for them. Accepting one of those things would make me feel owned, and I’m not owned by anybody. Not even the music industry,” he said.