STALKED BY MADNESS
How Bowie was driven to the brink of insanity by a toxic cocktail of a tragic family flaw and cocaine by the truckload . . .
DAVID BOWIE, who died aged 69 last week, was driven in the early years of fame by his obsessive personality. On Saturday, in the first part of this special Mail series, we told of his insatiable sexual appetite. Today, we describe how drugs drove him to the edge of madness . . .
DAVID BOWIE was always a madcap drama queen, even as a boy in the twoup-two-down suburban house in which he grew up in Bromley in the Fifties. His was one of the first in the street to get a telephone, and neighbours were more than once disturbed by bell-clanging ambulances dashing up to the door. He’d dialled 999: ‘Come quickly. I’m dying.’
One memorable winter’s night he even managed to get two fire engines along on a false alarm.
If there was a hint of self-delusional madness as well as devilment in this attention-seeking, then that was Bowie all over. Through all his years of superstardom, putting on then throwing off identities — be it Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Soulman, Disco King or The Thin White Duke — insanity never seemed more than a layer of make-up away.
It was what he himself worried about more than anything. ‘Paranoid schizophrenia runs in my family, on my mother’s side,’ he told his first wife Angie on the very first day they met. ‘Sometimes when I’m drunk or stoned, I can almost feel it in me.’ To a biographer, he confessed: ‘There’s a lot of madness in my family, real f***ing madness. It worries me because I don’t know whether it’s in my genes and if I’ll end up that way too.’
On occasions, this ‘nuttiness’ as he called it totally incapacitated him, as on the night of one of the biggest concerts of his life, in 1973. As thousands of fans waited in Hammersmith Odeon in West London, he fled from his dressing room and into a rubbish-strewn alley behind the theatre.
He was waif-like, weighing little more than eight stone, and his hands were stained nicotine-brown from the cigarettes he chain-smoked, 60 to 80 a day. In check shirt and jeans, his dishevelled (though normally glamorously coiffeured) head slumped in his hands, he looked like just another down-and-out.
There was just a lone spectator for this sorry sight, a 13-year-old East London schoolgirl named Julie Paull, who had travelled there hoping to catch a glimpse of the painted idol that was Ziggy Stardust. Could this sad heap of humanity really be him?
He beckoned her towards him and fixed her with a tormented glare from his unmistakably weird eyes — one blue, the other grey, resulting from a punch-up years before over a girl — and began to ramble on that he couldn’t go on stage, that his life was a total mess and he was finished.
Every one of his troubles poured out in a torrent as, in the grip of paranoia, he sobbed his heart out. His marriage was in ruins because he couldn’t keep his hands off other women (and men). His manager was ripping him off financially. His body and mind were wrecked by cocaine and amphetamines.
But his greatest fear, he said, was that he was actually losing his mind and slipping into insanity. As she listened in horror, Julie was witnessing David Bowie’s first mental and physical disintegration. He was like a man on a cliff edge, she recalled.
HE DIDN’T fall off, not this time. Ever the showman, he managed to haul himself back from the brink. Roadies were out frantically looking for him as he pulled himself together and headed back into the theatre.
‘Where’s David?’ a cry went up from his now desperate manager as the minutes ticked away to the start of the show. ‘You tell me,’ muttered the confused superstar bleakly, unsure who he really was and what his life was all about. Years later there was a similarly bereft situation when his friend John Lennon found him sobbing into a handkerchief and simply repeating: ‘Why? Why? Why?’
Yet that night in Hammersmith, dressed in a multi-coloured cat suit and red platform boots, then in black satin trousers with a diamond earring the size of a chandelier, he gave one of his greatest performances.
At the end, he dramatically announced he was killing off the character of Ziggy, to the shock of his audience (not to mention his band, who knew nothing of his decision and had in effect just been sacked).
He explained that he felt he was being taken over by his alter ego and it scared him. He had ‘to phase out Ziggy before Ziggy phased out David’.
That decision was presented as psychological necessity to save his sanity. But it was also a shrewd commercial move. Re-inventing himself brought in new punters to the cult of Bowie and kept the cash pouring in. He had no intention of being pensioned off and forgotten, the fate of so many in the music industry once they were past their sell-by-date.
Soon he replaced Ziggy with a new persona, Aladdin Sane — a lad insane. That was how, in his bleakest moments of depression, as in that alley at the back of the Odeon, Bowie saw himself. A mad man.
There was another explanation. It could have been the drugs he stuffed up his nose in industrial quantities that were freaking him out, which was the view of one of his musicians. ‘It was the cocaine,’ he said. ‘All that dope he took gave him a high at night and a low in the morning. That’s when the paranoia came out.’
But did he take the drugs because of the madness or was it the drugs that sent him mad?
Bowie believed the madness came first, rooted in his family and upbringing. He spoke kindly of his father, John Jones, describing him as a compassionate man who ‘had a lot of love in him but couldn’t express it’. He was saddened that ‘I can’t remember him ever touching me’.
But for his loud, fractious, moody mother Peggy, Bowie had barely a civil word, largely, it would seem, because she rarely had one for him. ‘A compliment from her was very hard to come by,’ he recalled. ‘I would get my paints out and all she could say was: “I hope you’re not going to make a mess.”’
He found her distant, and the atmosphere at home distinctly cold. An aunt said ‘there was not a lot of love around’ in the Jones household. To the end of her life, Bowie and his mother were often daggers drawn, arguing over anything and everything, except for the long periods when they did not speak at all.
He blamed her for his sense of isolation, for being ‘cut off from my feelings since I was maybe four years old’.
What he saw as her rejection of him caused a deep-seated insecurity that dogged him for much of his life. It
may have been the root of his generally predatory sexual attitude to women and his refusal to engage with them emotionally.
When asked by Michael Parkinson on television about his relationship with his mother, he quoted poet Philip Larkin’s famous line, ‘They f*** you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’
But what he does not seem to have recognised and dealt with more sympathetically was that his mother was struggling with her sanity, too. It ran in the family. One of her sisters was in an asylum because of depression and schizophrenia, a second was also schizophrenic and a third’s brain had been lobotomised to cure her ‘nerves’.
Bowie’s own odd behaviour was also increasingly a cause of anxiety for his family. By his early teens he slept no more than four hours a night while in his bedroom he was scribbling down his thoughts and sending them to world leaders — five letters a week to U.S. President Eisenhower at one stage.
He also had a tendency to burst into tears for no particular reason and was convinced he was being persecuted by teachers and pupils at school because he was left-handed. And then there was Terry. His half-brother was the fruit of an affair the sexually adventurous Peggy had before she met John. He was ten years older, good-looking, well-read and musical, and David worshipped him.
They shared a bedroom, and Terry introduced his teenage kid brother to Buddhism, Beat poetry and jazz and took him to London clubs to get his first taste of rock ’n’ roll.
But Terry was also a manic depressive and schizophrenic. Biographer Paul Trynka described how one day David watched as Terry collapsed in the street in a psychotic fit, jabbering that the ground was opening up and fire pouring out. His description was so graphic, David almost believed it was real.
His condition deteriorated until, just as Bowie was beginning his rise to fame with the 1969 hit Space Oddity, Terry was going into a mental institution.
Bowie stood back, terrified of being tainted by the same condition. He wrote about madness in his songs, but after that had little contact with Terry. He felt guilty but simply couldn’t handle the situation, to the point, as some of his family saw it, of neglecting his brother when he could have helped more.
For Terry there was no cure. In 1985, he slipped out of the mental home, walked to a railway line and lay down with his head on a rail waiting for an express train.
Bowie did not even go the funeral, for which he was hounded in the newspapers. But perhaps he didn’t see the point in such ceremonies. After all, it has been reported that his own body has been quietly cremated without a formal funeral.
But if succumbing to insanity was Bowie’s greatest fear, there were many times in his career when his bizarre behaviour came alarmingly close to that ‘nuttiness’ he dreaded.
AT ONE stage, he was convinced he was being stalked by Martians — ‘greenies’ — and that he was an extra-terrestrial, one of what he called the Light People, whose historic ranks included Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
As biographer Christopher Sandford wrote, unidentified flying objects were a lifelong fixation, and to try to make contact, he stood on the roof at home pointing a wire coat hanger at the skies. A passerby inquired, ‘Do you get BBC2?’ and even Bowie had to admit he felt ‘a pillock’.
As he became an international superstar and his horizons broadened, so did his screwball obsessions. In Los Angeles, he dabbled with neo-paganism and the occult, drinking his own urine, and sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by black candles.
He planned a new religion based on the worship of pain and claimed witches were plotting to have him inseminate them so they could give birth to the son of Satan. Indeed, they were lurking outside as he spoke — though this turned out just to be two fans.
In extreme paranoid moments, he was convinced one of his staff was a CIA agent, another in the Mafia and a third a vampire. He thought the Manson gang of hippy killers was out to get him and placed knives within easy reach to fight them off. He drew symbols on the window blinds to ward off evil spirits.
Increasingly it was the drugs talking. In his early career, friends remember it was coffee that was his preferred stimulant, plus cigarettes and the occasional amphetamine pill. But now it was the late Sixties and Seventies, and drugs were a fact of life in the rock and pop music business and easily available.
He moved on to marijuana — ‘incredible amounts’, according to one girlfriend — and LSD. There was so much dope and pills in his record studio that it resembled the Scotland Yard narcotics lab, one observer reckoned.
But it was when he turned to cocaine in 1973 that his drug use got the better of him. ‘Cocaine is a cruel drug. It makes people behave like absolute bastards,’ said fellow musician Keith
Christmas, and he was spot-on. Paranoia is one of its major sideeffects, especially on someone prone to feeling persecuted.
What was also worrying was Bowie’s addictive nature. Sex was a compulsion, so too was going on stage and showing off, putting on a performance. Cocaine would be the same.
Apparently he took a few ‘toots’ at first to calm himself down, over-anxious about his finances and what his management team was up to. But it quickly took hold and all too soon he was snorting hundreds of dollars worth at a time.
There were other reasons for his use of the white powder. It was an image thing, according to one of his entourage, ‘something he incorporated into what a rock star should be’. The drug also enabled him to work the crazy hours required to make records, play concerts and the other artistic endeavours he conceived in his fertile imagination.
He could keep going for 24 hours without sleeping. He claimed it also stirred his creativity. He told an interviewer that in cocaine: ‘I’d found a soul-mate which helped perpetuate the creative moment.’
But his soul-mate was a devil in disguise. Keith Christmas remembered Bowie dropping a bag of cocaine on a hotel floor and getting down on all fours to sniff it up. As biographer Christopher Sandford wrote, when performing, Bowie got so wired another musician said he resembled a tiger in a cage as he prowled from one side of the stage to the other.
He was thin, he twitched, his nose streamed, his eyes glittered, his lips stuck to his gums, he hallucinated, he scarcely slept or ate — all signs of serious addiction.
Friends in the business such as Elton John thought he was going to die. On tour with Bowie in 1974, music journalist Mick Farren saw ‘piles of the s**t everywhere. This was about as excessive as it got — in a period of excess.’
Bowie himself admitted being ‘totally out of my gourd’ at this time. ‘My drug intake was absolutely phenomenal,’ he told the BBC years later. ‘I was addicted.’
The paranoia exploded ever-more crazily. In one interview he babbled away, insisting that aliens were controlling his television set.
It didn’t help that some around him thought the drug enhanced his appeal. In her biography of Bowie, Wendy Leigh wrote how his friend and occasional lover Cherry Vanilla declared: ‘I loved him when he was on cocaine. He was really interesting. He would tell stories about magic and fantasy, and come out with conspiracy stories and crazy theories.’
In reality, he was dangerously off his head. It had to stop, especially after recording a particular album in 1975 in what has been described as ‘a blizzard’ of cocaine. Bowie was so strung out he couldn’t even remember making it.
What he did soon realise was that the friends he spent most of his time with were drug dealers. It was a wake-up call — and just in time.
He got out of Los Angeles and returned to Europe. There, he didn’t totally kick cocaine, but his worst excesses were over.
He knew he’d almost gone over the edge of sanity. He would recall the cocaine period of his life as ‘a blur, topped off with chronic anxiety, bordering on paranoia. I was undergoing serious mental problems and had too many grams [of drugs] in my system.’
But then came the only justification that mattered to him — and perhaps to the millions of fans now mourning his death. ‘However, I made some good music.’