Man who seduced the world
For all the tributes, he remains an enigma. This major series reveals the Bowie only his closest friends knew — a troubled but wickedly charming genius women (and many men) found impossible to resist
By HIS own admission, he could never say no, not once he discovered girls. Until then, David Jones, the kid who grew up to be the barrier-breaking phenomenon that was David Bowie, had been the perfect, goody-twoshoes schoolboy.
He liked reading books on his own in his bedroom at home, sang in the church choir (for five bob a time) and went to Cubs in his peaked cap and green sweater one evening a week.
In his manner, he stood a little bit aloof from the other rough-and-tumble boys growing up around him in the London suburb of Bromley in the Fifties.
A girl changed all that. Her name goes unrecorded — like many of the hundreds he would have sex with in the years of rock stardom ahead. But she was the first one in his primary school class of ten-year-olds to show signs of burgeoning ‘t**s’, as he put it. He was hooked.
A few years later, he went out with her, ‘when we were about 18. But I messed it up. On our second date, she found out that I’d been with another girl.’ She dumped him.
But that girl turned out to be one of a very few who ever took offence at Bowie’s ‘zip problem’. He was openly promiscuous. Took pride in it. Girls and boys. Men and women. Straights, gays, transsexuals. Any number. Twosomes, threesomes, foursomes, orgies. Any race, colour, creed. No prejudice, no distinction.
The rock legend, who died this week, aged 69, revelled in the physical excess of it all. ‘I had a wonderfully irresponsible, promiscuous time,’ he later told a BBC radio interviewer. ‘I was hitting on everybody.’ He admitted to having an addictive personality and sex was one of those indulgences he could never get enough of.
Some of those who are said to have pleasured him were big names — Lulu, Marianne Faithfull, Nina Simone, Susan Sarandon, Bianca Jagger, Tina Turner. Others were adoring women in his entourage, such as the exotically named publicist Cherry Vanilla, or in the rock business.
Whether one-night stands or longer-term lovers, they fell for his lean and hungry looks and his flamboyant style.
What inspired Lulu, however, was a particular part of his anatomy. ‘Some people have beautiful hands or beautiful necks, but I discovered that David had beautiful thighs, the best I’d ever seen. I had my own private viewing, up close and personal,’ she wrote in her autobiography.
Most of his enormous catalogue of lovers seem to have accepted that ever-lasting love and fidelity were not on the agenda. yet they still succumbed to trysts in his bedroom, bathroom, dressing room — even a walk-in cupboard in the case of Bette Midler — wherever the mood took him, and enjoyed the moment.
NOr, by and large, did they go blabbing. There was no kiss-and-tell, no hints of blackmail, no embarrassing pregnancies or love children, as there were, for example, with Mick Jagger, his close buddy and collaborator. Bowie slept around with an abandon that few ever matched, and not only did he get away with it, but news of his rampant promiscuity seemed to attract women rather than deter them.
When word leaked out that he had a habit of seducing anyone who worked for him, job applications to his management company rocketed.
How did he manage to be so successful a lover? The answer appears to be that he was charming and polite. He flirted, he pouted, he smiled, he seduced.
Sometimes he simply asked for sex, like the courteous gentleman many of his conquests remember.
At a particular party in his honour in Los Angeles, he stood on the sidelines for a while, transfixed by the sight of a very sexy girl dancing with a record producer called Kim Fowley.
Though he was rapidly achieving superstar status, and a click of his fingers would probably be enough, he didn’t just butt in, but waited until they came off the floor, then asked Fowley if the girl was with him. On being told no, Bowie walked over to her and formally introduced himself. ‘My name is David Bowie,’ he said disarmingly. (Full marks to him for not assuming she knew who he was, though of course she did.) ‘Would you like to accompany me to the bathroom?’
She accepted his offer. Wendy Leigh, his latest biographer, takes up the story: ‘Together they walked into the bathroom, locked the door and did not emerge for some time, ignoring two drag queens who hammered on the door with their high heels, screaming, “Open the door. We can do a better job than she can!”
‘When they emerged, Bowie kissed the girl on the cheek, shook her hand and said, “Thank you,” and off she went, charmed to the toes by Bowie, always among the most wellmannered of rock stars.’ He was even gentle to sex-hungry groupies, a breed usually despised.
As his one-time Pr and occasional lover, Cherry Vanilla, described in her memoir: ‘He was a great kisser. He was a better lover than I’d ever imagined — and not just in the physical sense.
‘The sex was as rough and aerobic as anyone could want, but it never felt like we were just having sex. It felt like we were really making love.
‘He was either a fabulous actor or a man whose emotions ran deep. But if it was acting, I couldn’t have cared less. I was so completely enraptured with the romance of it all and he gave me the impression that he was as well.’
Groupie Lori Lightning remembered being invited with other girls to Bowie’s suite at the Hilton in Beverly Hills. She was 14 and still a virgin, and what happened next would be roundly — and rightly — condemned today because she was under-age. In the paedophile-conscious climate of the 21st century, it could have earned him a jail sentence (as indeed it might have done then if it had been pursued).
But she had no complaint, then or later. As she confided to fellow groupie Pamela des Barres in the book Let’s Spend The Night Together, Bowie took her back to his bedroom at the Beverly Hilton, and said he was going to take a bath.
‘All of a sudden the door opens and Bowie is standing there with that gorgeous white skin and carrot-red hair, wearing a kimono. It was in his early Ziggy Stardust era. He came out and said: “Lori, could you come over here?”
‘I was so nervous. I’d never had intercourse. So he escorts me into the bathroom and takes off his kimono, gets into the bathtub, and sits there staring at me with those differentcoloured eyes.
‘you have to understand — he’s so gorgeous, his skin is so white and flawless. So he says: “Can you wash my back?” and that was just the beginning. He knew it was my first time, and he was so gentle with me.’
There was, undeniably, a coldly
calculating edge to Bowie’s charm. Some women were disturbed by how clinical and detached he could be as a lover — almost inhuman, as if they were objects, not human beings. One theory is that, in his early 20s, he loved deeply and lost — and was scarred by it.
She was a beautiful and clever ballerina by the name of Hermione Farthingale, a girl as respectably middle-class and English rose as her name suggests.
‘We had a perfect love,’ he recalled. She was besotted by him, too: ‘We were twin souls, very alike,’ she once said. ‘I was fascinated by this fey, elfin creature.’
They moved in together and, by his own admission, were almost inseparable. He began to talk of her as his fiancee.
But, after a time, the twin parts of Bowie’s nature — the one that craved contentment and the one that craved excitement — were in head-tohead conflict.
His response was to try to have his cake and eat it.
Hermione was not prepared to share him with other women, let alone men, and dropped him, while pursuing her own acting career.
Bowie was grief-stricken by the rejection — which struck a sinister and familiar chord in him, as we will see later in this series — and swore that he wasn’t going to get so close to someone again for a very long time.
And he never did, until he met and married his second wife Iman more than two decades later and stayed faithfully with her until his death.
In between, he went as far off the rails as he possibly could. You couldn’t say he’d been a good boy before his breakup with Hermione, but now he devoted himself to pure hedonism.
He found the perfect partner in 19year-old polytechnic student Angie Barnett, tall, boyish-looking, promiscuous and equally into women as she was to men. What he liked was that she seemed both shocking in her behaviour and unshockable. With Bowie’s music career now beginning to take off — the haunting Space Oddity a big hit in 1969, its intriguing ‘Ground control to Major Tom’ lyric on everyone’s lips — they were soon the coolest kids in town, egging each other on in breaking all the conventions of the day. They agreed from the start that theirs would be an entirely open relationship. Even on the night before their wedding in staid old Bromley they shared their bed with a pretty girl they knew. In her memoir Backstage Passes: Life On The Wild Side With david Bowie, Angie recollected how ‘we all got tipsy, fell into bed together, romped a trois until we all passed out, then woke late and rushed in a panic to the register office’.
now man and wife, they were nevertheless, ‘perfectly free to romp and dally with whoever else might tickle our fancy’ — and frequently did.
Home became Haddon Hall, a Victorian candle-maker’s mansion in Beckenham, Kent, with an imposing entrance hall 40ft wide and 60ft long, and a magnificent stained glass window rising above the short wooden staircase.
The couple rented it for £14 a week, complete with 30ft music room, a 25ft dining room and a 40ft living room, which Bowie painted dark green, while Angie dyed the lace curtains scarlet, a suitably dramatic backdrop for the debauched lifestyle they now embarked on.
Later, as Bowie’s success burgeoned and he was spending more of his time in recording studios in Soho, they moved into London and rented a sizeable terrace house in Chelsea, complete with a fur-covered bed in the sitting room that they called ‘The Pit’.
The house was kitted out in fashionable designer white. Bowie