“I’m having so much fun with the poisonous people
Spreading rumors and lies and stories they made up”
A quarter of what you read about any celebrity on the Internet is probably fake. For instance, I strongly doubt Bob Dylan had sex with a burrito while Bruce Springsteen, Tiny Tim, and Joan Jett egged him on (I just started this rumor). That percentage is even higher for David Bowie, who, after his and Iman’s morning tradition of staring at themselves in the mirror for a solid hour, should thank the Diamond Gods that cell phones weren’t around in the 1970s. There’s no one, man or woman, he didn’t have sex with, no pile of cocaine too tall for his nose.
If you go by mostly unverified rumors, that is. Here are seven of the most memorable.
7. He nearly missed his own wedding to participate in a threesome
Before Iman, there was Angela, a model and actress (and mom of Duncan) who in the mid-1970s, bought the television rights to Marvel characters Black Widow and Daredevil; there are even photos of her as the pre-ScarJo character floating around the Internet. She met Bowie when she was 19, and they got married a year later. They had an eventful wedding day.
Speaking to The Sun Sunday newspaper, she said:
“The night before our wedding it was a mutual friend of ours. We went out for dinner, back to her place and had plenty of lively sex. We had a very late night and didn’t go to bed until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. Then we woke up late in north London and had to be in Bromley by 10 a.m. to get married. We just about got there in time and staggered in. We saw David’s mother Peggy and I thought, Oh boy, this is not good.” (Via)
They divorced in 1980.
6. He had an affair with a German transvestite
Bowie’s time in Berlin produced three of his greatest albums: Low, Heroes, and Lodger. He also made some good friends while staying there.
Bowie, now obsessed with the Berlin cabaret scene, had yet another lover, a 6ft nightclub artiste who had been born a man but had had a sex-change. (Via)
Tangentially related is Amanda Lear’s (a French singer and Salvador Dalí muse who appears on the cover of Roxy Music’s essential album For Your Pleasure) insistence to Interview magazine that Bowie started a rumor that she was born a male. They also dated.
5. “My c*ck is still sore”
On March 23, 1985, David Bowie was Tina Turner’s surprise guest at her concert in Birmingham, England. They performed a song he co-wrote with Iggy Pop, “Tonight,” but that’s not what anyone remembers about the show: it’s Bowie apparently whispering “my c*ck is still sore” to a giggling Turner. Or that’s at least what it looks like (it’s around 2:09 in the clip above).
4. He named his penis the “Lance of Love”
More from Angela Bowie, this time from Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie, which the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin memorably reviewed thusly (I have also read this used rubber of a book, but used that gizmo from Men In Black to forget all of it):
According to Angela, the Thin White Duke boasts a long white trouser snake he cheekily calls the “Lance of Love.” Alas, the Lance apparently has a biological aversion to Angela’s honey pot. In a passage no more or less embarrassingly candid than anything else in the book, the authoress writes about how the Lance of Love would get a painful rash every time it explored Angela’s secret garden. (Via)
Here’s a seedy excerpt:
“I wasn’t going to put my mouth on it. He peed out of that thing. I’m sure he felt the same about my apparatus.”
3. Bowie and Slash’s mom, sittin’ in Slash’s mom’s bed, k-i-s-s-i-n-g
This entry’s probably more truth than rumor, but Bowie’s never confirmed it, and beside, Slash’s memory is probably a little hazy from the pounds of drugs he’s taken over the years. The year is 1973, when Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash was hat-less eight-year-old Saul Hudson, whose mother worked for Bowie as a costume designer. He saw Bowie a lot, and a little too much of him on one occasion.
“I caught them naked once,” Slash said. “They had a lot of stuff going on, but my perspective at eight was limited. Looking back on it I knew exactly what was going on.” (Via)
Slash has forgiven Bowie, though. “He was cool,” he said.
2. Bowie and Mick Jagger rolling boned
As anyone who’s seen the “Dancing In the Street” music video know, Bowie’s sexual chemistry with Mick Jagger is as obvious as his d*ck on SNL. They’ve been friends for decades — the Rolling Stones singer even gets a shout-out in “Drive-In Saturday” — but were they also friends with benefits? Legend goes that Angela caught her husband and Jagger in bed together. NAKED.
By October 1973, the Bowies were living on Oakley Street…Angie had been out of town for a few days when she returned home one morning and went straight to the kitchen to make some tea. The Bowies’ maid, who had arrived about an hour earlier, approached the lady of the house with a peculiar look on her face. “Someone,” she told Angie, “is in your bed.”
Angie went upstairs to her bedroom, slowly pushed the door open, and there they were: Mick Jagger and David Bowie, naked in bed together, sleeping. Both men woke up with a start. “Oh, hello,” said Bowie, clearly taken by surprise. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” Angie replied. “Do you want some coffee?”
Angie “felt absolutely dead certain that they’d been screwing. It was so obvious, in fact, that I never even considered the possibility that they hadn’t been screwing.” (Via)
1. SEX PIT
Nope, it’s not a mash-up of Mouse Rat songs — it’s exactly what it sounds like.
David Bowie once kept a four-foot-deep, fur-covered bed nicknamed “the pit” for orgies in his London living room…[In] his heyday, Bowie and his then-wife, Angela Bowie, “used to have the most amazing orgies at Oakley Street. Everybody f*cking everybody in the pit. Mick Jagger used to come there and be involved with sexual things.” (Via)
If I had a time machine, I would go back to the day Bowie’s SEX PIT made its debut.
