Bowie: A Biography (16 page)

“Most people think my life is very theatrical anyway because it’s played to the hilt,” he has said. “I like to do everything fully. I drink until I’m drunk. I eat until I’m full, frequently until I’m sick. I don’t fancy people; I fall in love with them. Leave out hate—it doesn’t come into my work at all. I’m terribly into intoxication—that’s the only thing that counts …”

Kemp first heard Bowie’s music while at NEMS, the British booking agency that was finding him employment as an opening act for various rock ’n’ roll shows. “They were getting me occasional gigs during what was then my mime act, billed as
Lindsay Kemp’s a Man Who Mimes His Own
Business,”
he says. Kemp is now in his seventies but his speech is still marked with dramatic rolling “R”s and fits of wicked laughter like John Lovitz as “Master Thespian,” on
Saturday Night Live
.

“I’d be put in those kind of university gigs and things with rock ’n’ roll singers and skiffle players and so on. And it was one day that I was in the office just checking that there was any work and the girls in the office said, ‘Oh my God, Lindsay, you have to meet and listen to David Bowie,’ who they had just met. Bowie had been in the office also trying to get work through NEMS even though he was with Ken Pitt at the time.” Kemp says, “They gave me his record and I took it away and that was the Deram record [entitled
David Bowie]
. And I just fell for him, I mean the songs, the music, the whole thing.” Kemp saw himself in those songs, and he also saw himself moving and performing to them. They affected his body as well as his emotions. He focused on one track, the meandering love song “When I Live My Dream.”

“It was so perfect for this little piece,” Kemp recalls. “I liked that kind of plaintive voice you see. So he, the voice and the songs he was singing about, appealed to me immensely. On that first occasion I wasn’t actually dancing to his music, I was just playing it as a kind of preset before the curtain went up, you see.”

The song became the soundtrack to his next performance at a small West End theater. Bowie was invited to the show and excitedly attended. This was among the only attention he’d received with regard to his widely neglected debut. The only problem was, nobody seemed to want to give David Bowie a chance. Dropped by Deram after the failure of his self-titled debut, he was again label-less.

In 1968, Pitt looked to find Bowie a new contract and was meeting with the Beatles’ new label Apple, Atlantic Records and Liberty among others. Bowie’s family was concerned. The singer was so broke that when it came time for him to pay his taxes, Pitt received a letter from John Jones saying, “It would be ironical if he was called upon to pay anything in view of the fact that his earnings from show business do not give him sufficient income to pay for his social security stamp.” He was about to gain something more important than immediate financial stability, however. Bowie was about to receive a philosophy. “He came backstage afterward
and it was love at first sight,” Kemp says today. “Well, most attractions are physical to start with. A blond angel, he was like one of the Ganymedes standing there. I mean, oh.” Bowie was flattered that Kemp had chosen his song and they got to talking. Bowie came the following day to Kemp’s small Soho flat, where they had breakfast together. “We immediately began to put our heads together and create something,” Kemp says. Bowie talked about his fascination with Eastern art and thought, and Kemp told him all about the Japanese Kabuki theater tradition with its outsized costuming and willfully attention-seeking ethic. “It was a very joyous meeting and a very fruitful one,” Kemp says. “We began to work immediately on this little show which was called
Pierrot in Turquoise
. Bowie suggested the turquoise, it being the Buddhist symbol for everlastingness.”

The plot of
Pierrot in Turquoise
was basically autobiographical. David played, appropriately, Cloud, a young muse of the titular character Pierrot (portrayed, of course, by Kemp). In a separate sequence, Jack Birkett plays the clown Harlequin. Birkett, a nearly blind dancer who performed under the stage name Orlando, was the star of Kemp’s company and another large personality to impress the young David Bowie. Kemp and Birkett seemed lifestyle models, like James Dean, Elvis and Little Richard were, only Bowie had never met Elvis or Little Richard and Dean was long dead. Here was someone who could influence Bowie directly and respond to his multiple queries in person.

“I began to think about costuming music, creating an alternate version of reality onstage. I wasn’t quite sure what the balance would be but I was always open to other people’s ideas and always so influenced by something I found dramatic,” Bowie has said.

“I really taught him to be audacious, because he was a bit timid,” Kemp recalls. “Through example. My own example. My example offstage of course, but I mean my example in the theater, on the stage and in the workshop as well.”

Kemp and Bowie enjoyed a brief physical affair as well, with Kemp expressing his desire and having his way with his starstruck new friend, although this act too seemed to be part of a larger curriculum. Bowie plunged into this tutelage with everything he had and there was no longer
much talk about shaving his head and fleeing to Edinburgh to become a monk.

“I taught to David the technique of the hypnotist and the lover. One has to hypnotize an audience to enchant them and of course make them love you. The Casanova technique. Not that that I needed to teach him much about the Casanova technique,” Kemp proclaimed.

“Lindsay always gave him hell,”
Pierrot’s
costume designer Natasha Korniloff has said. “He said he was as stiff as a ramrod and would get nowhere, but he’s pretty hard on people anyway. But Lindsay is also a very great teacher.”
Pierrot in Turquoise
quickly became a touring road show, with Kemp, Bowie, Birkett and Korniloff, who was also the van driver, playing theaters throughout Britain. “We were like a terrible gypsy encampment,” Korniloff recalled.

Reviews were encouraging but critical. “At the moment it is something of a pot-pourri,” the December 29, 1967, edition of the
Oxford Mail
observed. “Mr Kemp has devised a fetching pantomime through which Pierrot pursues his love of life, his Columbine, tricked by Harlequin and deceived by the ever-changing Cloud.” Bowie’s music, which provided the soundtrack, is singled out as “haunting,” his voice “superb” and “dreamlike.”

Predictably,
Pierrot in Turquoise
was not a commercial success, and both Bowie and Kemp were forced to follow each creative vision with the most threadbare of budgets. This period, marked by Bowie briefly turning his back on his pop gambit, did much for his creative soul but little for his welfare or that of his mentor.

“There were more and more debtors calling at Lindsay’s door,” Korniloff recalled. “All these bills and demands.”

As he struggled, Bowie knew there was always a warm meal and a bed out in Bromley, but it often came at the expense of the great nourishment his creative side was enjoying. Wasn’t it much more romantic to starve with these artists? he’d reason. No longer a teenager, he was struggling to find a balance between the world of his childhood and some kind of valuable, productive adult world as an artist. Both realms held darkness and bursts of bright warmth. Meditation only helped balance the two so much. He spent his days and nights stuck in the middle, a bit of a psychic mess. It was certainly no time for first love.

I

t was freshman orientation and my mother and stepfather had driven me up to Vermont from Long Island. We’d stayed overnight in a bed-and-breakfast and I remember falling asleep to the radio. It was playing a song by Bruce Cockburn entitled “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.” Next was “Little Miss S.” by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, an elegy for Edie Sedgwick, her namesake (still much better than the Cult’s histrionic “Edie (Ciao Baby).” This was, in Vermont anyway, “college rock.” I was wearing a black sweater that my grandmother had knitted for me. She complained because I would only wear them in black. Knitters like variety, stripes and checks or squiggles. Cosby sweaters. I was growing a little sick of black myself. I wanted some squiggles in my life and Bennington College offered plenty. The sophomore who led my tour had recently seen the independent film
My Life as a Dog
and terrified my mother by answering some of her earnest questions about cafeteria nutrition and curfews with barks and sometimes growls. I thought he was the coolest person I’d ever met. My high school had a dress code and a detention room. Up in the Green Mountains, I could wear whatever I wanted and do whatever I felt like, as long as it was reasonably legal and creative. Such freedom can be dangerous. You can wander too far off the path and just be a far-out individual, creating nothing but trouble for yourself. At night from “the End of the World,” at the ridge of the Commons Lawn, you could see every celestial body. I instinctively felt like I needed a North Star for the next four years, and I chose David Bowie, the Starman, waiting in the sky. Bowie got far out and reinvented himself, I reasoned, and yet never ceased to be creative. This was a discipline, and I would adopt it, both academically and behaviorally. I would major in Bowie-ism. I displayed his compact discs prominently on my bookshelf, returning often to
Young Americans
—for sex;
Station to Station
—for drugs; “Sorrow” off Pin
Ups
—when crushed out or sad;
Ziggy
—for when
my school was insane and my work was down the drain; and
Diamond Dogs
—for sex and drugs and being crushed out and sad
.

I soon found an accomplice in a student who called herself Flora and later Ufloria. She was from the West Coast, I believe, but mostly she just appeared without much warning, in Manhattan or Boston or Vermont, a vagabond, holding a small, portable boom box and, inevitably, a bag of pot. She later had a loose affiliation with the band the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but it seems like everyone I met at that time did as well. Bennington was the kind of place where you would hear people stomping around the lawn with earphones on, screaming along to the music playing in their heads. There was a Swiss kid named Michael or Michel who shouted Prince lyrics at God. You could hear him from a hundred yards, thanks to the echo in the valley: “People call me rude! / I wish we all were nude!” Others sang arias from their window. Ufloria sang Bowie, which is why I tracked her down. That and the rumor of her having pot. I was too shy to sing outdoors, or anywhere else, even with the pot, so I just nodded in agreement as she warbled. As it’s fairly easy, when sequestered in the mountains, to pretend it’s any era you like, we opted for the glittery early 1970s and took to painting silver stars on our faces. The stars were little pledges of allegiance to Bowie (“He’s the commander, I’m just a space cadet,” an original star-faced fan memorably says during the live L.A. concert footage in the 1975 BBC film
Cracked Actor
). Wearing stars, and outing ourselves as Bowie-ists, made us bolder. When we were hungry or out of pot, we’d stomp into the room of one of our classmates and demand food … and pot. Sometimes we’d be sorted. Other times we’d be turned away. Always, we’d bid adieu with “Bye-bye, we love you” (Bowie’s parting words after retiring Ziggy Stardust in ’73). Our Bowie union was sexless and innocent and pure. We were both reveling in this new freedom presented to us and the intellectual notion of Bowie, along with the constant soundtrack we maintained in those pre-Playlist days was our key, translating it all and allowing us to make sense and make use of college, and one day get out of the mountains and down into cities better, wiser and more well rounded. The idea of Bowie gave us courage to experiment. I remember driving home for Thanksgiving that November and informing my parents, my sister, her visiting friends and my aunts, uncles and cousins that I’d made out with a boy, just to see what it was like. When nobody asked what it was like, I volunteered
.
Much the same minus the stubble. As I recall this two decades on, Ufloria long gone from my life, I of course want to punch myself in the mouth. What a brat! But I am also struck by how brave just saying that out loud truly was, and how doing it in the first place was amazing. It is amazing to me still. I am not that brave anymore. Like losing your virginity, you can really only unleash your inner Bowie once
.

7.

“M

OD WAS FINISHED
, then the hippies got going,” Ray Stevenson, the photographer who began shooting Bowie in the late sixties and went on to become one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the London punk scene, would explain to me. “Very few mods became hippies. Bowie did, Bolan did. I think most of the youth cultures, the people who were part of it stayed with it through to middle age. Why did Bowie and Bolan change? Ambition!” Most Teds remained rockers when the mod movement began in the late fifties and early sixties. Quite a few mods continued to be mod when the hippie era dawned in ’67. Very few hippies transitioned into glitter rockers in the early 1970s. And most glitter rockers are still glitter rockers, only somewhat less ravishing to all but their immediate loved ones. The only frizzy-haired glams who ever became punks were very, very young Mott the Hoople fans such as Mick Jones of the Clash. David Bowie and, to a lesser extent, Marc Bolan, was indeed among the few who traveled from cultural shift to cultural shift over the years, pulling the best bits from each and altering their look to suit the times (with Bolan, tragically, being cut off at the dawn of punk) and strengthening their creative and professional hand.