Behind the complex genius of the greatest pop star ever
David Bowie was a pop phenomenon that changed the ground rules of creating and marketing music. Presented below is an excerpt from a new biography of the man by Wendy Leigh.
Wendy Leigh Simon & Schuster Pages: 320 Price: Rs 699
David Bowie’s allure has always partly been due to his capacity for confounding expectations, and the day of his wedding to Iman was no different.
His friends and family initially assumed that the wedding reception would take place inside the secluded compound of Britannia Bay House, David and Iman’s Balinese-style estate on the tiny private Caribbean island of Mustique, overlooking the ocean and completely hidden from view of prying paparazzi and besotted Bowie fans alike. More than practically anywhere else in the world, Mustique is akin to a fortress, its borders closely guarded by officials who, if necessary, are quick and effective in banning journalists, photographers, and sundry undesirables from ever setting foot on its hallowed soil.
Such was the high degree of security and the absence of intrusive press on Mustique that, some years before, Britain’s Princess Margaret was able to throw caution to the wind and cavort freely on the beach with London gangster and accused killer John Bindon (who, coincidentally, was also an intimate of David in the seventies). An enclave for only the very rich and famous, for kings and queens, princesses, billionaires, politicians, and tycoons, Mustique (which, despite its elite, jet-set allure, or perhaps because of it, Iman does not particularly like) is an airtight world of privilege and privacy.
But regardless of the beauty of David’s Mustique home, and the security he’d be guaranteed by holding his wedding on the island, he instead opted for the cliché of throwing a public, celebrity-style wedding that would be immortalised in the pages of Hello! In deciding to sell his wedding to the magazine for a sum that might have been as much as four million dollars and agreeing to pose for photographs with Iman for hours, David opted for cold cash — yet also drove such a hard bargain that although he and Iman were photographed throughout the wedding ceremony at Saint James Episcopal Church in Florence, Italy (after which eight photographs were published in the magazine’s twenty- three- page coverage), and at the reception, he insured that the privacy of most of his 68 guests was preserved, so that very few of them were photographed for Hello!
Awarded pride of place at the wedding reception in Florence’s regal Margaret Jones, an imposing woman of 78, though struggling with bad health, graces a plush, ornate, red velvet and gold cherub–garlanded throne. As Margaret — or Peggy, as she is known — gazes forthrightly into the camera, her blue eyes are clear, with a farseeing psychic quality to them (she was said to have a talent for mental telepathy, one that David has claimed he shares). Her warm smile displays her snaggled front tooth, a twin to David’s (before he had it fixed through the miracle of cosmetic dentistry), and her palpable star quality and commanding presence are a testament to how close the apple has fallen to the maternal tree.
Peggy had always been a brave and fearless pioneer, who in 1940s England wore pants long before they were acceptable attire for ladies. And like her son David — the world’s first rock star to publicly out himself, to talk to the press about his open marriage, to wear makeup, stark white nail polish, and dresses — Peggy was also a rebel, a woman born to flout the bourgeoisie. The mother of three illegitimate children (including David) at a time when a girl could have been ostracised by society for having even one, Peggy was never afraid to dance to a different drummer. Nor — and again the similarity to David is remarkable — was she afraid to embrace two diametrically opposed camps in a relatively short time span.
Peggy briefly became enamored of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (the British equivalent of the Nazi Party) and in October 1936, when she was 23 years old, attended one of their rallies in the prosperous spa town of Tunbridge Wells. However, according to Peggy’s sister Pat, when protesters flung rotten fruit and vegetables at Mosley’s followers, Peggy was far more transfixed by the macho swagger of the Fascists in their fetching black shirts than by the fracas surrounding her.
Yet though an acolyte of the British Union of Fascists, which routinely terrorised Jews all over Britain, less than 10 years later, Peggy had a love affair with Jack Isaac Rosenberg, the son of a wealthy Jewish furrier, and bore him a son, David’s half brother Terry, nine years his senior.
A similar dichotomy is evi- dent in David’s own history. In 1976, he was accused of making the Nazi salute, while standing up in an open Mercedes convertible (an accusation that he went on to deny), and around the same time also threw out a few positive remarks about Hitler, proclaiming of him, “His overall objective was very good, and he was a marvelous morale booster. I mean, he was a perfect figurehead.”
So that just as his mother was once seduced by the glittering visual image of Mosley’s Blackshirts, David clearly was as mesmerised by Nazi style, swagger, and sharp tailoring. Yet his good friend Marc Bolan was Jewish, and so is the second most important woman in his life (after Iman), his best friend and faithful retainer in every area of his private and public existence since 1974, Corinne “Coco” Schwab, an American who was born in the stock room at Bloomingdale’s, after her mother went into labour in the store’s linen department.
At David’s wedding reception, Coco is all radiant smiles, her thick, efficientlooking, shiny black bob creating a helmet around her face, a reminder that she invariably plays bad cop to David’s good. As his gatekeeper and protector, Coco is legendary for her fierceness in eradicating from David’s universe all those whom she considers to be undesirable (including his first wife, Angie) and protecting him 24/7 at a cost to her own life and authentic existence. Coco’s dedication to David has always been unimpeachable, right through his drug-addled years and his divorce from Angie up to and beyond 2013, when she was on hand to assist in the making of his video for “Love Is Lost,” which premiered at the Mercury Music Awards.
He was the world’s first rock star to publicly out himself, to talk to the press about his open marriage, to wear makeup, stark white nail polish, and dresses.
Excerpted with permission from Simon & Schuster