Bowie: A Biography (44 page)

“I’d stay up for weeks. Even people like Keith Richards were floored by it,” Bowie would later recall. “And there were pieces of me all over the floor.”

Hughes increasingly had no idea what Bowie was talking about. “Do the dead concern themselves with the affairs of the living? Can I change the channels without using the clicker?” Bowie jokes during his episode of VH1’s
Storytellers
, taped in 1999 and released to retail a decade later. Other obsessions included an obscure form of photography called Kirlian, which is supposed to capture the aura as well as the flesh.

“He felt inclined to go on very bizarre tangents about Aleister Crowley or the Nazis or numerals a lot,” Hughes says. “It’d leave me scratching my head. He was completely wired. Maniacally wired. I could not keep up with him. He was on the edge all the time of paranoia, and also going on about things I had no friggin’ idea of what he was talking about. He’d go into a rap on it and I wouldn’t know what he was talking about; remember,
I was pretty loaded. I was thinking about sex and he was thinking about … whatever.”

“My other fascination was with the Nazis and their search for the Holy Grail,” Bowie later clarified. “There was this theory that they had come to England at some point before the war to Glastonbury to try to find the Holy Grail. It was this Arthurian need, this search for a mythological link with God. But somewhere along the line it was perverted by what I was reading and what I was drawn to. And it was nobody’s fault but my own.”

People down on the streets knew Bowie was up in the Hills. Groupies came and went, along with dealers, hustlers and hangers-on. “I had certainly collected a motley crew of people who would keep turning up at the house. A lot of dealers. Real scum,” he recalled. Strangers at the door. “Women coming and going,” Hughes says. “A lot of sex and debauchery going on. We were going for it. My dealer was always at the house. We never ran out of cocaine.”

“I paid with the worst manic depression of my life,” Bowie has said. “My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twenty-four hours a day … I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth.”

Occasionally, David would reach out to people from his past who had recently been excommunicated, former MainMan employees like Tony Zanetta and Cherry Vanilla. According to his old Arts Lab co -founder Mary Finnegan, there are reports that he even rang Chimi Rinpoche, his Buddhism instructor. “When he was having a very rough time in L.A., he apparently phoned Chimi,” says Finnegan. “He told Chimi he was in deep trouble and asked would he come out and talk to him. Chimi said no. He said, ‘If you want to talk to me you come to me; I don’t go to you.’”

Angie was in London with their son during this time and received several desperate phone calls, some frightening enough for her to book a flight. “He sounded like he might just as well have been off in the emptiness of some awful cold black hole, out there in the timeless infinity far beyond the reach of warmth and earthly human feeling,” she writes.

Increasingly, Bowie was convinced that there were witches after his semen. They were intent on using it to make a child to sacrifice to the devil—essentially the plot to Sharon Tate’s husband Roman Polanski’s
1968 supernatural classic
Rosemary’s Baby
. Cherry Vanilla, who no longer worked for Bowie but had recently been discussing plans for him to produce an album that might launch her singing career, recalls one such desperate phone call. “He had been calling me from California saying he was gonna produce a record for me,” she says. “But he had this whole thing about these black girls who were trying to get him to impregnate them to make a devil baby. He asked me to get him a white witch to take this curse off of him. He was serious, you know. And I actually knew somebody in New York who claimed she was a white witch. She was the only white witch I ever met. So I put him in touch with her. I don’t know what ever happened to her. And I don’t know if she removed the curse. I guess she did.”

The witch that Vanilla is referring to was a semi-famous Manhattan-based intellectual named Walli Elmlark. Elmlark taught classes in magic at the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences, then located on Fourteenth Street, just north of Greenwich Village. She wrote a gossip column in then-popular rock magazine
Circus
and had become friendly with Marc Bolan and the late Jimi Hendrix. She’d even recorded a spoken-word album with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp (who would later add his distinctive circular guitar sound to Bowie’s “Heroes”) and even published a cosmic paperback full of collages, poetry, personal confessions and observations entitled
Rock Raps of the Seventies
. When she was practicing witchcraft, according to
Rock Raps
, she’d wear a “floor length clingy high necked long sleeved black jersey, and a floor length chiffon over dress that floats around me like a mysterious mist of motion,” adding, “Usually I am in pants … always black and silver.”

“She was known as The White Witch of New York,” says Timothy Green Beckley, a paranormal book publisher and friend of Elmlark’s. “She had a large clientele which came to her for advice on various subjects in their own personal life. She was into personal power. Candle burning. Whenever she did a spell for somebody she always made sure they protected themselves by surrounding themselves with a white aura of protection. She didn’t dabble in Satanism or black magic or gris-gris. She was very positive and always worked with the light and with positive vibrations and always sent people in a good direction. A lot of musicians turned to her for spiritual guidance.”

Elmlark had met Bowie once before at a New York City press conference during the first Ziggy Stardust tour. Summoned to Bowie’s residence, she quickly and apparently successfully exorcised the pool. Angie, who was living there at the time, noted that it started to bubble and smoke (but then she also insisted that it was only raining outside David’s window while the rest of the L.A. sky was clear). Elmlark wrote a series of spells and incantations out for Bowie, in case the demons return for a dip, and remained on call for Bowie as he continued to wrestle with the forces of darkness. “He took her word as gospel,” Beckley says. Elmlark departed from this plane of existence in 1991.

What might have actually saved David Bowie from the clatter inside his old head is the same thing that had always been there for him when things grew desperate and dark: his uncommonly strong work ethic and creative discipline. While hopelessly addicted to coke, he managed to act in his first major motion picture and was intent on composing the film’s score as well.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, directed by Nicholas Roeg (who’d already created a pair of seventies classics in
Performance
and
Don’t Look Now)
, is perhaps not a classic seventies film in the sense of being revolutionary and bold, but it is certainly classically seventies, as it’s based on an obscure literary property (a novel by science fiction writer Walter Tevis), it’s an indictment of corporate greed (in this case the media giant World Com), has scads of gratuitous nudity and boasts the participation of seventies icons Buck Henry and Candy Clark. It’s also, like the blunter end of seventies “classics,” rife with ham-bone symbolism (footage of sheep being led off to the slaughter). “Although Roeg and his screenwriter, Paul Mayersberg, pack in layers of tragic political allegory, none of the layers is very strong, or even very clear,” legendary critic Pauline Kael wrote of the film. “The plot, about big-business machinations, is so un-involving that one watches Bowie traipsing around looking like Katharine Hepburn in her transvestite role in
Sylvia Scarlett
and either tunes out or allows the film, with its perverse pathos, to become a sci-fi framework for a sex-role-confusion fantasy. The wilted stranger can be said to represent everyone who feels misunderstood, everyone who feels sexually immature or ‘different,’ everyone who has lost his way, and so the film is a gigantic launching pad for anything that viewers want to
drift to.” Kael really nails the lasting appeal of the film in that last bit, not to mention the lasting appeal of the David Bowie myth itself.

Performance
had starred Mick Jagger as doomed rock star Turner, and Bowie’s competitive edge, one he maintained with the Stones singer through much of his career, certainly helped motivate him to keep his head long enough to out-Roeg his rival. Roeg originally thought of Peter O’Toole and the author and director the late Michael Crichton
(Westworld, Jurassic Park)
for the role of Newton, the alien who travels to Earth in an effort to transport water to his wife and family on their dry, dying planet. After seeing the BBC documentary
Cracked Actor
, he was convinced that Bowie was the ideal Newton. Roeg heard rumors about Bowie’s drug addiction but did not make it an issue, and for much of the shoot, away from his dealers and hangers-on in the mountains of New Mexico, Bowie was clean and professional.

“I decided to not do anything or say anything [about it],” Roeg says. “To try to adopt a manner that if anything happened, it would shock me. You can’t reason someone out of anything. The one thing you can try to do is make them conceal it more, give them a sense of love. I’m not into the guilt thing or trying to cure anybody of our humanity. Especially in a societal way, everybody has a sense of shame, guilt, secret happiness, accusation or praise. There are certain things I wouldn’t want to know about someone anyway, even those nearest and dearest. And I wouldn’t want them to know certain things about me. It all goes back to this idea of exposing yourself. You have to live with yourself first.”

Roeg and Bowie drew as much as they could from the actor’s real life to bring Newton into focus. His real-life bodyguard Tony Mascia, for example, plays Newton’s bodyguard. The limousine in which Newton cruises through the burnt-orange desert is the same limo from
Cracked Actor
. Each detail fed the kind of “He’s just playing himself” critiques that would later be used to dismiss Madonna in her 1985 debut
Desperately Seeking Susan
and Eminem in his film debut
8 Mile
. This downplays the actual work, which both Candy Clark and Roeg attest to.

“What was really neat about Bowie was that he always wanted to run dialogue and rehearse, which I attribute to him being a musician,” Clark said of the rehearsal period. “We wanted to get it right and Nic wanted it word for word. So that was our challenge.”

“There were certain people who were concerned about his unconventionality as an actor, wondering if he was being used as some sort of gimmick,” Roeg says.

In the film, Newton crash-lands in a New Mexican lake in a town called Haneyville. He climbs down a mountain with a hood over his head and makes some fast cash at a junk shop. Somehow he has a British passport. He fixes his hair a lot. He meets Buck Henry’s Mr. Farnsworth and registers nine basic patents, netting him three-hundred million dollars in three years’ time. Then he plans to harness the Earth’s water and beam it home to his arid (and yet somehow very milky) planet on a blue laser beam.

Hiding out (under the alias Mr. Sussex) in a chintzy New Mexican hotel, he meets Clark’s Mary-Lou, a boozy housekeeper, after collapsing in an elevator. Mary-Lou carries him to her room and nurses him back to health. Their courtship is played out with equal parts rom-com sweetness and pitch-black wit. “What do you do for a living?” Mary-Lou asks him. “Oh, just visiting,” he replies. She is as much a misfit as he is; both of them are now headed nowhere.

As their relationship progresses, Newton tempts fate by revealing his genitalia-free, yellow-eyed, froglike true self to Mary-Lou. They try to make love regardless but she pisses herself and flees to the kitchen in tears. “It’s that thing about always wanting to know more about your partner, or hear them promise things in a natural way,” Roeg says. “So all that was already a part of Candy’s natural being. Just in her human structure, she’d understand that pleading—for someone to tell her everything about themselves, especially if she’s a wife. But I suppose that scene shows that you don’t want to delve too deeply into someone. There’s a terrible tragedy to that in terms of human relationships and exposing yourself. Rather than ‘Who are you?’ it’s more a question of who someone
isn’t
. And Bowie was quite marvelous at that.”

Despite the fact that Roeg and the actress were then an item, the British director filmed sex scenes between Bowie and Clark that are both jarring in length and explicit in nature. “I think he kinda liked it!” Clark recalled. “He got a kick out of it. English people can be very kinky.”

Newton’s plan goes to hell after a sexed-up college professor turned World Com executive (played by another great seventies movie touchstone, Rip Torn) rolls over on him and the government intervenes. Newton
is set to board his spaceship and head home. Only the ship is a trap. Newton is prodded and poked in dozens of medical exams but ultimately thrown away. He’s left rich, perpetually drunk and beautiful as everyone else around him ages, so it’s hard to feel too bad for him. He records an album for his wife, saying with a shrug, “She’ll hear it one day. On the radio.” It’s clear he will spend the rest of his life dissolute and sloppy. The last line of the film, after he spills another cocktail, is “I think maybe Mr. Newton has had enough, don’t you?” “I think maybe he has,” Torn agrees. Like the bodyguard and the limo, this conclusion was true to Bowie’s actual life as well.

Bowie was sensing he’d indeed had more than enough by the end of filming, but upon returning from New Mexico to L.A. on the Super Chief train, he immediately fell back into his manic habits.

When he was hired to play Newton, Bowie assumed he would be working on the film’s soundtrack, only to be told that the soundtrack would be provided by John Phillips, late of the Mamas and the Papas. His assumption, incorrect as it was, placed him back in the mind-set of song-writing, and soon time, and lots of it, was booked at the then brand-new Cherokee Studios in Hollywood. Built on the site of the old MGM Studios, the five-room recording center was conceived by its owners as an alternative studio with top-of-the-line equipment and perfect acoustics but a funky, homey vibe, complete with incense and Christmas lights in the communal lounge area. At the time, most studios still resembled clinics.