(6 of 9)
Before Space Oddity became a hit, Bowie could be seen at various venues throughout Britain, performing a mime inspired by the Chinese invasion of Tibet. (Please, do not rush to the exits. Proceed in an orderly fashion.) After two more years and yet another record company (his sixth), Bowie produced his first important album. Hunky Dory was a hothouse of lush rock that contained such Bowie perennials as Changes, Oh! You Pretty Things and the enigmatic The Bewlay Brothers. That song may have been an oblique allegory of David and Terry Jones, who has spent much of his adult life in a mental institution and whose illness has long haunted his half brother. Six months after Hunky Dory was released, Ziggy Stardust appeared, and Bowie ceased to be a simple star, or even a force. He became a movement all by himself.
It did not take long for the imitators and disciples to rev up, but Bowie held on to his commanding lead. Although he had by now married Angela and had a son Zowie, Mom and Dad both made it clear they were not domesticated. "How does it feel," a combative reporter asked Angie, "to be married to the man who everybody thinks is the world's king faggot?" "I think it's great," she replied. "I love it. It all depends on your knowledge of gay culture, of which I can happily say I'm a member."
Bowie, who speaks frequently if not persuasively of his shyness, says he created characters to mask his own feelings of inadequacy. "I really didn't feel back then I had too much to show," he says. "What would I do up on a stage? The only thing was to try and conjure up a figure to do the performance for me because I felt I was much safer playing roles. I was writing plays for these people, minimusicals." This, in turn, took on its own dark corollaries, with some assistance from various controlled substances. "I found," Bowie says, "that I was adopting the characters offstage. And then I found that I was living like the character, that the character was slowly evolving and taking over."
Bowie had taken his name, he once told the Novelist William S. Burroughs, because "I wanted a truism about cutting through lies." Not even Jim Bowie's renowned blade could have cut through the craziness that was surrounding Bowie now or even the tales that had been building up around him. As early as 1969, according to Tony Visconti, who lived outside London with David and Angie, life was like a lysergic version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. "Thursday night was gay night. David would go to a gay club, Angie to a lesbian club, and they would both bring home people they found. We had to lock our bedroom door because in the middle of the night these people they brought back home with them would come climbing into new beds, looking for fresh blood."