"It's absurd this idea that celebrities can't be anonymous," Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, wife of David Bowie, told The Observer last June. "We even went on the London Eye." The image of the supermodel, Bowie and their daughter Lexi joining the hoi polloi in transparent pods above the Thames while holidaying in the UK recently is an intriguing one. How, one wonders, were the Bowies able to evade the paparazzi while living "normal" family life so visibly?
Wendy Leigh's Bowie: The Biography [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] is largely concerned with Bowie's other, much less normal life, ie the pre-Iman years. This is only right, of course, given that this was when the singer did most of his best work. It's important to stress, however, that this New York Times best-selling author has more to say about Bowie's dalliances and excesses than she does about Hunky Dory, Low or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Together with Christopher Ciccone, Leigh wrote 2008's Life with My Sister Madonna, the kind of penetrating but controversial work that can typecast a biographer. Entertaining and informative as Leigh's latest book is, it's perhaps telling that it starts with an account of Bowie and Iman's 1992 wedding in Florence, an event which Hello! magazine paid millions of dollars to document across 23 glossy pages.
Like Hello!, Leigh has a specific audience in mind here, hence there will be no talk of the brilliant modulations Bowie factored into Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, and no further rumination on the cut-up technique his lyrics borrowed from William Burroughs. To be fair, this is an approach that many will welcome with open arms, but it's odd that at no point does this Bowie biographer flex an adjective to describe her subject's voice, one of the most distinctive and classy instruments in pop. It's a bit like making an omelette without the eggs.
More than anything, perhaps, Leigh’s fairly compact book is a who’s who of Bowie’s love life. Accordingly, she leaves no duvet unturned. With Charlie Chaplin’s widow Oona, Elizabeth Taylor, Susan Sarandon, Bianca Jagger, Ronnie Spector and countless others among Bowie’s conquests, it’s quite a roll-call, and nor does Leigh shy away from the activities that took place between consenting adults from September 1969 at Haddon Hall, Beckenham, the Edwardian mansion that Bowie shared with his first wife Angie, née Barnett, during their decidedly open marriage.
Sex is such a prevalent theme in Leigh’s book that, when you get to the end of it, it’s the women who rejected Bowie’s advances you remember most. Debbie Harry of Blondie, for example. Or the Belgian-born Monique van Vooren, whose appeal to Bowie was magnified by the fact that she once dated Elvis Presley (a star who, like Bowie, was born on the 8th of January).
Leigh is good on how the peculiarities of Bowie’s family background shaped him – and on what they cost him. She argues that his distant, emotionally undemonstrative mother Peggy left him in want of a more loving maternal figure who eventually arrived in the shape of his long-term PA, Coco Schwab, a woman so devoted she would wake him each morning with a fresh orange juice, then light his cigarette.
More darkly resonant, Leigh shows, was the schizophrenia that ran in Bowie's family and ultimately led his half-brother Terry to take his own life. It was in January 1985, after he'd escaped from Cane Hill asylum in Coulsdon, Surrey, that Terry Burns jumped down on to a nearby railway track and was run over. The author explores Bowie's long-term estrangement from his half-brother in some detail and cites the singer's fear of developing schizophrenia as both a black dog and a key creative spur, but curiously she doesn't mention Jump They Say, the 1993 single on which Bowie alluded to Terry's suicide directly.
Naturally, the book has its lighter moments too, and it details plenty of starry encounters. Morrissey chatting to Bowie on the phone is a droll clash of egos, Bob Dylan is unimpressed when Bowie subjects him to repeat plays of Young Americans, Marlene Dietrich refuses to be photographed with the Thin White Duke despite him travelling to her Paris home to meet her, and Frank Sinatra is adamant that "no English fag" is going to play him in a movie.
It’s Marc Bolan and John Lennon who emerge as friends proper, and this despite a certain sparky rivalry with Bowie. Leigh tells how, when Bolan died in car crash in 1977 and his son Rolan was left cash-poor due to his mother and Bolan not being married, Bowie stepped in to pay for Rolan’s education. She also records that Lennon’s conversation-nixing riposte to the question “Are you John Lennon?” (“No, but I wish I had his money”) was gleefully appropriated by Bowie, who would adapt it for own use when similarly buttonholed.
This is all good stuff, but there are places in Leigh's book where mistakes and misplaced conjecture niggle. Play School, the long-running UK children's show watched by the young Bowie, was broadcast by the BBC, not ITV as Leigh has it, and her thesis that the (fabulous, let's be clear) Mick Ronson guitar sound on 1970's The Man Who Sold the World "perhaps marked the birth of heavy metal" is just plain wrong, as fans of bands such as Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer can attest.
Elsewhere, the author draws an awkward line of connection between Bowie’s left-handedness and anisocoria (different-sized pupils), and the considerably more alienating and debilitating condition of Joseph Carey Merrick, otherwise known as The Elephant Man, whom Bowie portrayed to great acclaim in a Broadway production of the same name throughout 1980. Leigh is trying to make a point about Bowie being able to empathise with Merrick, but the lack of parity between their respective trials makes her comparison seem an unfortunate error of judgement.
All the same, the author has enough supporting quotes and anecdotal evidence to paint a full and convincing portrait of the artist as a young man. Bowie is charming but sexually predatory. He can be ruthless or extraordinarily kind. He’s a big reader and a picky eater. He wants to know the date of birth of journalists due to interview him so he can do their astrological charts. He’s highly adept at self-promotion and headline-grabbing sound bites, but is for many years ruinously naive about his sometime manager Tony Defries’s profligate spending of his (Bowie’s) money.
It’s the final chapter of Leigh’s book that is most satisfying. Beginning with Bowie and Iman’s February 2000 announcement that they were expecting their first child, it attempts to bring things right up to date. With Bowie’s wild years behind him, moreover, Leigh can stop cataloguing his conquests and really think around her subject.
She details the death of Bowie's mother in 2001, his turning down a knighthood in 2003, and the heart attack he suffered onstage in Oslo in 2004. Bowie's subsequent retreat to the secure "panic room"-equipped loft apartment in SoHo, New York City, that he shares with Iman and Lexi is also discussed, as is the bolt-from-the-blue masterstroke that was Where Are We Now?, the single he released on January 8, 2013, his 66th birthday.
I'm not sure that Leigh's book warrants the definitive connotations of its title Bowie: The Biography; rather it is a biography, or another biography – one curiously lacking proper analysis of the great man's music.
That said, you have to admire Leigh’s closing flight of fantasy, wherein she imagines what went through the head of Ken Pitt, Bowie’s early-period manager, when he visited the Victoria and Albert Museum’s David Bowie exhibition in 2013 at the age of 90. It’s an evocative and poignant piece of writing, the author employing a winning change of tack right at the last.
James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.
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